June 13, 2010

Publication title: The New York Times, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: New York
Writer: Jon Pareles

Critics’ Choice: New CDs

Many of the songs on “Laws of Illusion,” Sarah McLachlan’s new album, end with her virtually by herself: just her voice and a minimum of accompaniment, alone in a quiet place. “Laws of Illusion” is Ms. McLachlan’s first album of new songs in seven years, and her first since the dissolution of her 11-year marriage to her band’s drummer, Ashwin Sood; they separated in 2008. The new album’s songs revolve around breaking up: the tension, the denial, the failed reconciliations, the anger, the reckoning, the aftermath. Titles tell the story: “Illusions of Bliss,” “Changes,” “Don’t Give Up on Us,” “Heartbreak.” The songs are as direct as Ms. McLachlan’s have ever been, and as finely turned.

Ms. McLachlan has long been pop’s voice of compassion and consolation; in these songs she needs those comforts herself. “I’ve seen much more than I want to/So much anger so much pain,” she sings in “Love Come,” which appears twice on the album: once with an elaborate studio arrangement, and, as the album’s finale, performed more slowly on piano with a string orchestra. “A line is drawn and lives are torn apart/The wounds too hard to heal.”

She hasn’t radically changed her music. Ms. McLachlan wrote all but one song herself or with her longtime producer, Pierre Marchand, and the album is as lush and measured as their previous collaborations. It’s a collection of ballads, hymns and waltzes, sung in long arcs of melody with a voice that enfolds its strength in breathy intimacy. Acoustic instruments gleam, with unearthly keyboards and electric guitars billowing up around them.

It’s a kindly, enveloping sound that Ms. McLachlan has long used to conjure passion and empathy laced with melancholy. But now it encompasses a new anguish, deeper and sharper than what she hinted at with “Afterglow” in 2003. “Awakenings” begins with pulsations, something like Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” but as the singer feels her marriage crumbling — “the games we play to hide the tangled dread inside” — electric guitars and drums boil over into rock. At the new album’s center is “Forgiveness,” a piano anthem along the lines of McLachlan songs like “Adia,” but this time her stately tune arrives with a bitter resolve. “This house of cards it had to fall,” she sings. “You ask for forgiveness, you ask for too much.”

Longing has always been one of Ms. McLachlan’s richest subjects, and “Laws of Illusion” includes affectionate thoughts like the single “Loving You Is Easy.” But love isn’t the haven it was. Even as the song bounces along with piano chords in a Beatles-style shuffle, Ms. McLachlan confesses to trauma — “I became so small and insecure/ Didn’t know the cost of all I’d lost” — and she ends up not embracing her lover, but wondering, “How long must I wait till I see your smile?” Once again she’s alone.