(2015) Julien Baker - Sprained Ankle [FLAC,Tracks] {100.XY}

Review:
“Sprained Ankle”, the bracing debut solo album from the Tennessee singer-songwriter Julien Baker, is packed thick with the sort of lyricism that would be triumphant if it weren’t so worrying.
Ms. Baker sings in a shivering whisper, the voice of a naïf, but her imagery is colorful, direct, intricate, harrowing. Mostly, she paints vignettes of addiction (“Rejoice”) and physical frailty (“Brittle Boned”) and belief, inheriting the unobstructed bloodletting of second- and third-wave emo – “Something” owes debts to Waxahatchee and Dashboard Confessional – but stripping it free of artifice. She sings without self-consciousness, like on “Everyone Does”: “You’re gonna run when you find out who I am/I know I’m a pile of filthy garbage you will wish you’d never touched.”
And her lyrical precision can be gobstopping, like on “Sprained Ankle”: “Shaving off breaths/Each one so heavy, each one so cumbersome/Each one a lead weight hanging between my lungs, spilling my guts.” The lone sign of hope on this bleak album comes at the beginning, on “Blacktop,” which reads as a long-shot prayer from a broken person who’s held on to faith. “Come visit me in the back of an ambulance,” Ms. Baker pleads, and you hope it’s not too late.
Rating 8/10




Tracklist:
01 Blacktop
02 Sprained Ankle
03 Brittle Boned
04 Everybody Does
05 Good News
06 Something
07 Rejoice
08 Vessels
09 Go Home

Summary:
Country: USA
Genre: Indie-Folk


Media Report:
Source : CD
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : ~572-852 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits