Singer-songwriter Jennifer O’Connor has a voice that’s really more worthy of an imperative than a description: go listen to it yourself. Recommendations of O’Connor’s latest release, “Here With Me,” come forth with a few more qualifiers, so you should listen to those, too, but the recording may leave you convinced that O’Connor could sing anything and make it sound lovely—the weighty pop-folk of “Here With Me” or jingles for toothpaste and cereal.
O’Connor writes seriously, though—simple songs of love and loss, ones that would risk sounding simplistic without the support of her effortlessly consistent vocals. In truth, there are still moments of lyrical awkwardness (the anti-pop culture fumblings of “XMas Party”); pockets of repetitive intonation (the directionless “Days Become Months” captures a mood, but it’s not one I want to linger in for four and a half minutes); and sadly sizeable piles of forgettable lines and melodies, but O’Connor sings with such clarity and sincerity that I almost feel bad for saying so.
This may be due to the album’s utter lack of pretention: what O’Connor presents is real, and, because of that, it’s really pretty good. Furthermore, there are elements of the album that fully deserve to be called beautiful. The austere confidence in the vocal opening to “The Church and the River,” the confessional acoustic style of “Valley Road 86,” and the viscerally melancholic chorus of “End of the Hall” each point to possibilities that could carry O’Connor’s career further if sustained.
O’Connor backs herself with coffee shop-esque guitar, piano, and organ. Jon Langmead provides drums, Michael Brodlieb plays bass, and Michael Strandberg adds more guitar, with a few extra instrumental and vocal guests also credited. The twelve songs were impressively recorded and mixed in twelve days—a budgetary necessity rather than an artistic choice, but not one that appears to have impacted the integrity of the songs. A full band is a luxury for O’Connor, and surely the quartet must be tight to have hit the caliber of the live tracks with limited takes, but the music appears content to ride backseat to O’Connor’s vocals. Compositionally, this tends to make sense, and the album’s one attempt to rock, “Daylight Out,” feels somewhat canned and out-of-place.
Another imperative to whoever is in charge of such things: get this woman some stellar songs and a knockout band, stat. Whenever “Here with Me”’s phrasing and arrangement rise to the merit of O’Connor’s voice, the effects are compelling, quite literally. The real challenge seems to be that O’Connor’s songwriter sensibilities are still playing catch-up to her singer abilities, but she makes things sound so nice in the meantime that I hardly mind waiting around.