The Daily Spin, August 1
Veronica Swift | This Bitter Earth
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
Album: This Bitter Earth (2021)
Artist: Veronica Swift
Link:
There are gorgeous moments of simplicity in Veronica Swift’s This Bitter Earth, an album that is as heartwrenching as it is soulful, an exploration of jazz-influenced piano compositions as much as it is show-tunes or even, on rarer occasions, ventures into rock.
When the compositions are unafraid to just be is where they’re at their best - album opener ‘This Bitter Earth’ twinkles under somber piano, a river of strings gently easing us from moment to moment. It’s all a little Collierian, reminiscent some of the slower tracks off of the Djesse trilogy - lacking that bombastic flair that his more energetic tracks hold, but hitting emotional depths that he rarely tends to press towards.
For me, there’s a pretty fine line between jazzier compositions and show-tunes, and it’s one that can make or break my enjoyment of an album - to an extent, I feel bad for feeling this way, but the theatrical nature of a lot of these compositions is so at odds with the misery-laden subject matter that it’s hard for me to put it together in a way that makes me want to listen to the album again.
This album scores well entirely on the back of its instrumentation, some of the finest we’ve had in some time, the sort of glittering beauty that makes its appearance in sultry club scenes in noir movies, gorgeously arranged throughout - but the lyrics undo it in spades. Unfortunate.
Rating: 6.2/10
Best Tracks: This Bitter Earth
Worst Tracks: How Lovely to Be a Woman; The Sports Page; Sing