Rachel Brooke :: Late Night Lover

I reviewed Rachel Brooke’s last album here at CC2K and gushed quite a bit about it. If you didn’t like my gushing, I apologize. Also, you should probably stop reading now, because I’m about to gush again.

Late Night Lover is a quartet of songs. Rachel sings while hypnotically strumming her guitar. As always, she evokes the past, but not “ironically” or as some precious thing, but because there’s a certain kind of magic old music evokes in us.

This album is a thematic story cycle that could easily loop back to the beginning after the final song has finished. We’re taken from the first fast heartbeats of new love to the final gasps of love faded.

Late Night Lover sounds like Hank Williams and the Carter Family and the aching blues of one Bessie Smith and could it be that I hear just a touch of Billie Holiday? And don’t you hate it when reviewers reference other artists in an attempt to describe the tunes they’re writing about? Well, there you go.

I don’t feel too bad about doing it, though. Why? Because if there’s any justice in the music world (very rarely), then people forty or fifty years from now will say that some singer or another reminds them of that ‘ol Rachel Brooke they used to listen to on quiet and brooding evenings, while the sun was setting.

What we have here are four dark lullabies that take us to Parts Beyond. This here’s unadorned, raw-to-the-gut country blues.