Chris Pureka has learned to see in the dark, the dark as pain and sorrow you can be sure of that and learning this is a hard thing to do, the hardest of all.
Her fifth and new album ‘How I Learned To See In The Dark’ is a long tunnel of darkness carrying a bare honesty and a certain desolation just like the countryside her songs seem to occupy.
She is also a storyteller, and sings haunting stories about pain, loss and hope. Her style reminds those of Patty Griffin and Gillian Welch but she has invented her own world of anger and melancholy. She can write almost dylanesque songs like ‘Lowlands’ without being a caricature at all.
The songs often start quietly to finish in a full sound expressing anger or pain or both, like ‘Shipwreck’, which begins with a slow guitar stream and continues in a thunder of enraged guitars and violins. The opening track ‘Wrecking ball’ embarks you in a journey through her obscure country where pain and heartbreak want to explode. It may also reminds you REM’s ‘Everybody hurts’ with more rage and folk accents. In the dark ‘Hangman’ it seems she is about to do some hurt. There is a lot of variation in her vocals and she has a voice that can almost whisper in your ears or be very loud and strong like in ‘Broken clock’ which explores her vocal capacities.
It is the kind of album that requires attention and if you try to listen to it on a bright sunny afternoon it may bring you back to rainier and greyer days. Bring you back to these lonely moments, these sad ones that are always with you, and it does not matter where you are with your life right now, they are right back jumping at your face. So why would you listen to an album that brings you back to your darkest places? Because pain is part of life and no moments of happiness can erase them, and also because pain forges your own identity.
But Chris Pureka has learned to see through her pain and the album also gives plenty of hope like in the delicate and beautiful acoustic sound she produces in the intro of ‘Landlocked’ or ‘Damage control (Prelude)’, or especially in the lovely melody of ‘August 28th’. The album ends on this pure note of hope, life may be about misery and nonsense ‘Some times you think you spend your whole life/just counting grains of sand’, but there is no reason to give up and if it is a fight ‘we’ve been out there fighting the good fight’
Chris Pureka is certainly fighting this good and honest fight and she is wining this place apart in this vast and confusing American musical landscape till the light at the end of tunnel.