Photo by Kendall Rock
Review: Ira Wolf unlocks deep humanity with new record, ‘Rock Bottom’
Wolf’s new LP digs deep into the nature of the human race.
Windswept and wistful, Ira Wolf’s Rock Bottom captures human existence in its purest form. Pressures of isolation, born out of the first year of the pandemic, wrought songwriting fire while wringing her soul clean. It was both draining and replenishing, as she refilled her creative cup and stepped out anew. With 11 songs, Wolf meticulously combs her life, from love to heartbreak, and feels it all pounding in her eardrums. There’s a sense of transformation occurring in real-time, finding the singer-songwriter catapulting from the present into a truly transcendent state of being.
“There’s nowhere left when you’re already so far down,” she sings on the titular cut, her sinewy vocals stretching like thorny vines. This line echoes across the record, like so many ghouls shaking chains in the attic. Such sorrow informs her vocal choices, laden and bound with the deepest and darkest of emotions. “You just ran away / I’m glad you got away,” she crows. Her performance centers the album, out of which she is then able to relay all the other stories, equally downhearted and joyous. “I went to sleep in my 20s and woke up in a new world,” her words are sharp yet delicate inside “New World.” Wolf is agile, slipping between melodies with ease. And she has never sounded so good. Four albums in, and she’s blossomed into an unforgettable vocal interpreter.
Rock Bottom stretches like elastic. Often cloudy and somber — as evidenced by such moments as “Monster,” in which Wolf sings, “You learned how to ruin me / And that’s what scares me to death” — the record throbs with a particularly jagged fragility. Where “Currency” laments that love is nothing more than something to be exchanged, “The Boat” basks in love’s sweet glow before it all unravels in the end. Between these wonderfully thunderous songs, Wolf shovels in intense clarity that she never had before. It was only in writing and performing that she willingly gave up of herself, extricating those dried and hollow parts of herself and casting them off to the sea. “I’m a boat, that’s all I’ll ever be,” she weeps.
Transitory and elusive, Rock Bottom ebbs and flows as tenderly as the strings stitching the musical fabrics together. The palette and brush with which Wolf paints are both vibrant and muted; as any artist knows, it’s far more important to effectively wield these tools than it is to show off. Anyone can show off, but the mark of a great craftsman is to make the audience feel something deep in their gut. And goodness, does Ira Wolf put the listener through the emotional wringer. Wolf stamps her heart into the grain of Rock Bottom, plain and simply among the year’s finest releases.
