Wilderness

I caught the tail end of Sophie B. Hawkins' live performance on 26 July 2004 at the House of Blues in Chicago, where she was supporting Chris Isaak. I was very impressed by her passionate performance featuring some rather large vocals - not Joplin-esque screaming but big nevertheless. So I bought Wilderness, which was her current album at that time.

This album turns out to be a very good album. However, much of it is quite poppy and isn't the rocker that I expected when I bought it. Many of the tracks aren't really my thing - there's a little too much loopy drum programming for my liking. Still the performances are all very nice especially considering that Hawkins appears to play most of the instruments on many of the tracks.

For me the highlights of the album are Sweetsexywoman and the closing 3 tracks Angel of Darkness, You Make Me High, Feelin' Good. These are the tracks that are more reminiscent of the live performance I saw. They're a bit jazzier and tend to be a bit heavier than the rest of the album. I really like these songs.

However, the album closes with an "Infinite Space Mix" bonus version of an earlier track Soul Lover. This track doesn't do much for me and I feel it detracts from the nice closure that Feelin' Good gives the album. I think I'll delete this "bonus" track from my various media players. I often do this with classic albums that have no need for a "bonus" - sometimes I put the bonus tracks into a separate "album" in case I do actually want to listen to them.

I think I'd like to hear more of Sophie B. Hawkins... though I'm not sure which albums to look at...