Is Sarah Blasko going through deep trauma, or a massive break-up? Many of the songs on her new album, Depth of Field, seem to indicate so.
In some places they call to mind Donna Summer; in others they are reminiscent of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s troubling (and sublime) Murder on the Dancefloor. Her music is shot through with desire, a longing that goes beyond the usual template of imagined and sometimes real slights. Calling a song Never Let Me Go may well not be the most original idea around, but Blasko invests the phrase with a degree of vulnerability and hope that goes far beyond the norm.
The songs on Blasko’s sixth album feel possessed of a dark undercurrent, the sort of edge that comes around after you have spent one too many late-night hours waiting for your partner to return home from carousing. You can visualise the mirror ball throwing cascade confusion during the opening song, Phantom, but the lyrics refer to something darker yet, a “phantom heartbeat”.
Is Blasko singing about an imaginary child? A never-born? Her poise and her voice are immaculate – crystalline, enticing – but the music and sentiments seem deeply troubled. Blasko herself claims the song concerns other matters entirely.
“I asked my dad [a history and English teacher] to record himself reading poetry for inspiration,” she says. “He quoted a line from Nietzsche which contained the word ‘phantom’. This song is about the role that influential people play in your life, forming who you are. I feel I carry them with me. Their presence is so tangible even when they’re not there, like a phantom limb.”
A phantom limb: this is what Depth of Field feels to me right now. Songs like the swirling Heaven Sent and beckoning intimacy of Read My Mind race around my head like a real friend, or a forbidden lover. I have carried this album almost everywhere with me for weeks now. Whether it is playing through my headphones or not, Blasko’s cajoling, sensational voice soundtracks the inner sadness and mundane reality of the 10.09 train to Guildford. Another half-hour delay? Another chance to listen to Blasko.
Reviewing this Australian songwriter’s Aria-award-winning fifth album, 2015’s Eternal Return, I made reference to Olivia Newton-John. In particular, I feel that both singers have the ability to perform broken hearts that can help shatter and mend real ones, too. I wrote: “Her songwriting craft is so advanced, her grasp of pop so redolent, it is sometimes easy to forget how great a singer Blasko is.”
I stand by those sentiments for Blasko’s sixth, recorded on the cusp of an international breakthrough, surely. The brace of betrayal songs – A Shot and Never Let Me Go – stalk these lonely streets with menace and unrequited desire in their hearts – brutal and honest and suffused with melancholia. These are as great as any Australian pop I have heard, from Kylie Minogue to The Easybeats. Similarly, Blasko’s music often feels like it follows the lineage of mod and the core values of that style: aspirational, inspirational, forward looking, tightly wound, late-night fuelled.
Every now and then, Blasko wanders into glam-stomp diva territory. And of course she owns it. The deliciously naughty (not fragile at all) Everybody Wants to Sin is Goldfrapp without the high heels, a shiver of delight to seduce the dancefloor. Every dancefloor. Everywhere.
• Depth of Field by Sarah Blasko is out through EMI on 23 February
