Less Than Lovers/More Than Friends

Menos que Amantes, Mas que Amigos. Some languages are more sonorous; English is definitely less sonorous in the case of this titular phrase. Vive la differénce!

On this record’s opening track, “La Noche,” Sadie Rock sings the last several instances of the refrain in Spanish. Here, she glosses how the heteroglossia of multiple languages can capture the differing and fractured—yet each entirely truthful—perspectives of people who encounter one another. I hear this song dancing the architecture of connections, gliding along the arc of how these are electrically generative. “La Noche” thrums with the sense of how, even when as fleeting as a fuzzy evening, connections spark a conflagration of memories and anticipations and in-the-moment hellfire that sweetens into embers even as it sours into ashes.

This is Sadie Rock’s great aesthetic strength, to my ears: she courts both the furious burn and the gentle dissolve. She wants the world. She will wrestle all of the world into her music, angels and devils alike. All the metaphors, all the metonyms, all the morbidity, all the majesty…in the earlier albums Mad House and All In, she and the band reach for the heights of fairy-tale castles and the depths of gut-wrenching abjection. Rock’s songs, throughout all four of her recordings to this point, reflect dramatic lyrical sweeps—emotionally direct narrative and incisive observation are refracted through figurative writing, as color and symbol abound. These songs’ sounds themselves similarly sweep across a span of styles, hard rock chords sharing the aural stage with pop hooks, prog rock timbres, and stringent folk downstrokes. Through Mad House and All In, these distinctive elements churn through Rock’s emerging cauldron, bubbling forth in ribbons then returning into the thick mix.

Ahhhh, and then…and then as she weaves the glorious tapestry of wit and warmth that is her third album, The Man I Loved is Dead, Rock fills in its colors (tapestry-filled-in-by-experience-with-color is the artist’s own gorgeous image) with sharp, glimmering precision in new vistas both lyrical and musical. The cauldron’s brew becomes a diamond-edged kaleidoscope of light and tone through which each song is focused and finds it force. For instance, I’ve strived my whole life to be anything but a “Regular Man,” assuredly often failing, but never have I been so certain I want to be anything else than when I envision a life filled with “catalogue love.” Yikes; I shudder. I hear echoes of Nick Cave here, not only in the title track (loud echoes there) but everywhere, and the footsteps of Gentle Giant, and the enveloping whispers of Taylor Swift, throughout The Man I Loved is Dead—a bewildering span, to be sure, but this tapestry is surprisingly seamless. The most profound shift is in Rock’s singing, bringing this broadening of styles across with confident phrasing and robust, apt articulation that feels fresh, that enlivens each song and ensures it a unique place in the tapestry. This record, nominated for a Josie Award for 2022 Album of the Year, gives us a wide, whirling view of what wrestling with the whole world has wrought for Rock at this point in her artistry.

Less That Lovers/More Than Friends, Rock’s new EP-length document, does what compression can do to a glimmering diamond: It hones the musical panorama of the previous record into a more intimate gem, a gem perhaps more strikingly multifaceted in its miniaturized form. One marker of this new, compressed phase in her art is that Rock herself is credited with playing all instruments other than drums, sculpting by herself the sundry sides shown here. The lang-like torch song “Curious, Babe” invites us next to “Dance” like The Yeah Yeah Yeahs might dance. The vocal and textural long-limbed braid of “Night & Day” harkens to early Mitchell then leads us to a rather different stream of turn-of-the-70s tunes, the taut yet propulsive mid-tempo rock ballad that the Stones gifted to so many descendants, Rock included, on the title track. Less Than Lovers/More Than Friends, like all of Rock’s work, doesn’t need the validation of the famous influences I invoke here to recommend it; listening will handle that all by itself. However, I trace these sonic outlines in part because they cast Rock’s catholic ear in a compelling frame and in part because it’s astonishing how smoothly her voices—her literal singing voice and her songwriting voice—embody their continued presence in her. That’s why, after repeated listens, the final two songs have become my favorites after initially being the two that least leapt out to me. “Take Care” is a magnificent song because it serves so beautifully as a vehicle for Rock’s voice, and in a quite different way so does “The Summer That Took Me Down” (a bonus track available only on CD—woo hoo for physical media!). Especially in the case of “Take Care,” Rock sounds not like Tay or Axl or Joni or k.d. or Mick—she sounds entirely like Sadie. Uniquely like Sadie. Having begun to listen in the days of Mad World, I hear this voice with overwhelming joy, joy for its maturity and self-assurance and particularity. And especially, with joy for what might be next for Sadie Rock.