Review: Liz Brasher brushes religion with the secular on debut album, ‘Painted Image’

Early on in His ministry, Jesus Christ spoke eloquently and with gusto on works of mercy, unconditional compassion, obtaining perfection and lowliness of spirit. With The Parable of the Wise & Foolish Builders (Matthew 7:24-27), an oft-cited passage from His longest speech found in the New Testament, called the Sermon on the Mount, He likens one’s intentions and pursuits of glory to constructing a house on either an even-keeled bed of hard rock or the precarious stretch of beachside sand. In the story, He preaches, “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

Having grown up in a hyper-vigilant Christian home, a gushing spring-well of musical delight, tip-toeing between staunch religiosity and the secular, soul singer-songwriter Liz Brasher is fully aware of Christ’s many teachings. In fact, she extracts the above parable for the end-of-days baptismal “Living Water,” a cobblestone of an organ’s echoing hum, funk guitar strings and a gospel choir’s breezy prompts. It’s a point of comfort and reprieve in her hike through life’s winding pathways, staging a makeshift tent out in the wilderness for an epic revival. This particular hymnal is offered up where the altar meets the cross, at which she bares her soul in the light of a higher power. “Don’t build your house on that sand / It may seem safe on dry land / When the waves crash through, you’ll need a rock to hold you,” she says in an act of sanctification. Her own conceptual retellings are never in spite or hatred, always with a keen eye for empathy.

Throughout much of her debut record, Painted Image, out now on Fat Possum Records, she invokes biblical themes to frame her own transformation from a young girl to a strong, untamable maverick and her perceptions of the world around her. With the brassy opener “Blood of the Lamb,” a nod to Jesus Christ’s sacrificial earthly sojourn (He was often referred to as the Lamb of God), she pencils her own vision of St. John the Baptist, the forerunner of Christ who brought the gospel to Judea. “One day by the river, I saw the light / Eatin’ locust and honey on a dark, dark night,” Brasher sings, making note of John’s own diet of locust and honey [Matthew 3:4 reads: “John’s clothes were made of camel’s hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey”]. She unburdens herself tenfold through such divine discourse, kneeling before the vestige of John and the gathering flock also desiring redemption. She later wrestles with overwhelming self-doubt and  her burgeoning faith, somehow coming to terms with such a dichotomy smack in the middle, “Yeah, I am dressed in black, I walk in white / Thoughts unhinged, speak out loud / Who are you to tell me who I am? / I got the blood of the lamb…”

Scott Bomar (known for playing bass for such legendary Stax artists as Rufus and Carla Thomas, Eddie Floyd and William Bell) twirls in the producer’s chair, injecting the record with swarthy garage and dirty southern tendencies. But it’s truly Brasher who commands the conversation. Recorded inside the hallowed rooms of Memphis’ Ardent, Royal and Electraphonic Recording studios, the album bends and breaks over and over and over again ⏤ Brasher struggles tirelessly with morality in a modern world, her sometimes toxic romantic entanglements and evolution of faith. “Body of Mine” whips between growing into her skin, discarding the deadened exteriors and feeling comfortable with natural impulses beyond her control. “Someday, I wanna rest this body, rest this body of mine / One day, I wanna be somebody, walk into the light,” she sings, questioning exactly what kind of agency she has over her body.

Brasher, half-Dominican, half-Italian, rips through glistening touch points of Etta James, Amy Winehouse and Otis Redding with graceful, remarkable speed. She’s as precise in her craft as she is carefree, allowing the stories, the music, the instruments to guide her. “Every Day” pokes the embers of a decayed relationship, The Dap Kings-worthy horns prodding her forward and away into the dusk-dusted horizon, and on “Air,” she sings into the perfumed atmosphere of her never-ending adoration of a lover, no matter the distance that leaves them distraught. “Only thing keeping us apart is the air / They say birds of a feather wanna fly together / I left my trail for you there,” she whispers, hearty images fluttering as eyelashes on the spring’s cool breathe. “Only thing keeping us apart is the air / Look up, look up, I will be right there.”

The funkadelic “Hand to the Plow” positions the harrowing destruction of Sodom and Lot’s wife’s disobedience as Brasher’s own warrior-like vindication. In the book of Genesis, two angels descend upon the city of Sodom, home to Lot and his family. When Lot offered up his two daughters as a sacrifice, the two angels refused and commanded Lot to flee from the hellfire and brimstone that was about to engulf the entire town. During their escape, Lot’s wife turned to behold the now-devastated concrete caucuses and was transformed into a pillar of salt. Brasher manifests her own allegory of resisting carnal temptations with grand imagery, “There’s a man down the road / Says he’ll sell me his soul / I know love can’t be bought / Pillar of salt in my lot / Ain’t no looking back / I ain’t putting my hand to the plow / Threw my harvest down / And I’m gonna reap it now.”

The schmaltzy ballroom ballad “Cold Baby” squeezes out the last drops of her anguish (“I’ve never stood in a wind so frigid / As I have when I’m standing right next to you / Oh, I was left unattended, I was facing the elements / All while you just sat and you stared”), excommunicating her demons from her bones, and “Love Feasts” could be surmised as her return to the church ⏤ “Twice dead and a waterless cloud is hanging above your head / I been trying to preach the truth with the words that you bled,” she prays, seemingly at the foot of the cross, Christ’s image seared into her every thought. Later, with “Heaven and Earth,” another sweeping gospel number, she illustrates the exhilarating rush of love in the bigger scope of things. “Don’t stop ’til you know / Heaven came to meet Earth,” she remarks.

Brasher’s Painted Image is as a cathedral of stone and stained-glass. Booking end this chapter, the titular cut is her final bow and a lonesome, heart-rending resignation of how things just are. “But I bled red and I couldn’t change the time / And all is black and white except that I’m a painted image,” she melts into the sun with both regret and acceptance of what has come to pass in her life. Through harvesting vast musical styles, also displaying hints of classic pop and countrypolitan, Brasher is a true marvel. She counterpoints the barbed-wire ways of the world with the warmth of faith, seeking real answers to life’s hardest, most brutal questions. There’s no going back now.

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