Review: Alice Wallace lays down her weary heart with ‘Into the Blue’

More than 10,000 immigrant children remain unlawfully held in detention centers all across this country. Earlier this week, a report indicated the Southern Poverty Law Center have filed a class action law suit. Last summer, heartbreaking photos and videos of men, women and children in chain-linked cages were circulated by the current administration in an attempt to dissuade the sheer brutality of such unfeeling actions. Regardless of political affiliations, what is so terribly troubling since last summer’s asylum-seeking mayhem is the severe and swift lack of humanity or compassion. Americana muck-raker Alice Wallace plants her feet at the center of the windstorm with a song called “Desert Rose,” a touching, evocative piece depicting one immigrant woman’s journey across the border to give birth in a grimy gas station bathroom. Wallace’s voice falls like diamonds onto hardwood, textures clashing against one another; crystal against splintered timber casts a devastating image.

But that’s the way with Wallace. She’s mesmerizing, and when you get her going, she’s a sharp-shooter of insight much like a gunslinger and her pack of silver-laced bullets. “As her belly grew more round, the handsome man left town / And she was left alone to sit and wait / She carved a wooden rose, for the baby’s name she chose / And swore her child would never share her fate,” she hollows out the simple truth of such a sojourn, terrifyingly wrought with uncertainty and perhaps a tragic end. Her paintings are crisp with detail, slathered with oily frankness, hypnotizing you to partake in extraordinary feats of humanity. And you’d be hard pressed not to walk away a little more enlightened.

The full runtime of Wallace’s new album, Into the Blue, her debut on Rebelle Road Records, is as western-flecked lore etched into redwood fence posts scattered like skeletons across the perimeter of a cattle ranch. She gallops down dusty trails of pain, loss, sexism, self-reliance, womanhood and the renewal of mind, body and spirit, leaving behind crinkled footprints in the sand. “Sail away into the blue / It’s out there waiting / It could be waiting for you / You’re only scared of the things that you can’t see / The most beautiful things you only see in your dreams,” she sings with the romantic pin-up of the title song, which was born out of her primal craving to play music for a living. In quitting her day job, a decision that proved to be the right one, Wallace picked herself up off the ground by her bootstraps and has since exercised her swarthiness in song-craft, twisting her pen to exhume the most fascinating remains of human existence.

The record, produced by Steve Berns (Calico the Band) and KP Hawthorn (Ethan Thompson, Diana Bravo) is a tattered, spine-snapped book of hymns so engrained in our brittle bones that you not only step into sweeping, cinematic-glossed tales but you see yourself ⏤ maybe for the first time in your life, the flaws curling as wrinkles on your brow and like crow’s feet sweeping away from sagging eyelids. “Elephants” is an especially crucial piece to Wallace’s panormaic puzzle, an analyzation of the crushing male gaze, sexual assault and the accompanying sorrow for such a harsh reality. “Walk with a purpose through the parking lot / Keys ‘tween your knuckles cause you ain’t got claws / Rememberin‘ when your daddy taught you that / Boys will be boys you gotta watch your back,” sings Wallace, her words slicing back open society’s wounds that just may never properly heal.

With “When She Cries,” a heavenly, guitar-crusted ascension, she observes the terrifying mudslides that have ravaged and shredded the California earth, upending homes and its peoples. “The freeways have an inch of standing water / ‘Cause the sewers can’t keep up with the flood / But we’re all still moving at 80 mph / Because caution never did us any good,” she hammers out the scene with quick, metallic jabs. She unearths astonishing beauty under the caked mud and gravel, opening up her story with a sublime message of resilience. “Echo Canyon” is an ornate fixture, too, of expansive imagery with reverberating yodels, an acoustic-rung ballad that witnesses her most stunning line of conviction. “A chilly wind moans / To join in the song / Then a coyote howls / Out there in the distance / I ain’t goin‘ nowhere / So I just sing along,” she paints as Vincent van Gogh at his canvas.

Wallace is an exemplary craftsperson. She gives of every bone in her body, every fiber of her heart, every single breath for an album that beats in time with the rush and thrill of living. “Motorcycle Ride” leans into the breeze and the gentle caresses of a new lover, stealing away into the mountainous woodlands. “The mountain air was sweet, and I sipped it in like wine / His cabin smelled of redwood and linseed oil and time,” she sings, unwrapping a vivid snapshot of that risky rendezvous that would soon become quite vital to her personal growth. “Santa Ana Winds” is a fiercely driving lamentation on the raging wildfires, a soul-consuming reflection of carnage and despair. “We come from dust and ashes / And to such we may return / Light a candle to St. Barbara / And watch it burn,” she moans between licking flames of percussion and strings.

Into the Blue is Wallace’s magnum opus, whittled with misery and truth and love and loss. It’s a timely, profoundly-apocalyptic set-piece of inescapable tragedy and bent with sterling vocal showmanship and incomparable songwriting. Wallace, simply put, is a force of gutting power.

Photo Credit: Adrienne Isom

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