Review: Marlene Oak tours vintage blues & torch song with new EP, ‘Silver Moon’
Bluesy torch singer mesmerizes with a truly impressive new EP.
Such torch songs as Billie Holiday’s “Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?)” and Julie London’s reworking of “Cry Me a River” excavate unbridled longing and heart-torn romance, unfurling bold declarations of unconditional adoration in the throes of intimacy and the inevitable crash. Musically, the style of classically-structured torch singing, a sub-genre of popular music also containing such immovable fixtures as Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey and Patsy Cline, builds an impenetrable force-field of emotionally-taught electricity in precise increments. Harvesting similar tragic, fabled tales of abandonment and faded infatuations, a theme woven into the fabric of many modern-day romancers like Adele, Sam Smith and Lana Del Rey, blues singer and songwriter Marlene Oak provides a fresh imprint on the genre with her latest EP.
Silver Moon is laced with unquenchable pain, often leaving her to caterwaul through thick and smokey layers of electric guitar. “You say that you love me / Then, why did you leave me behind / I tried to get along / But the time passes by so slow / I was hoping for something / That you would hold me in your arms,” she confronts on the slow-burning waltz number “How Can I Move On.” Oak’s vocals are like burnt velvet whose potent aroma flairs the nostrils and leaves you gasping for air, a vain attempt to recover some former state of being or glory that’s long been decayed and rotten on the hardwood. She later admits full-stop, “This pain hurts too much.” And you believe every single word, as the conviction splashes a delicately-searing mist across your own skin, blistered and altogether worn ragged. “I need some relief,” she later quakes inside the star-cast “In the Evening,” perhaps her most muted rooftop weeper.
“My heart went boom / It’s broken down / I can’t keep my eyes from crying,” she sings in misery-bound whispers on the title cut, an opening pronouncement that not only positions the EP’s overarching thread but provokes the listener to crumble under unsteady feet. Playfully menacing drums bumbling and hiss beneath the groundwork, an imposing choir of trumpets baying like injured sheep across barren pastures, and Oak is firmly planted in the eye of the storm. Even amidst such an astonishing and vulnerable performance, her brokenness glistening right in the spotlight, she is in full control to expose exactly what needs to be said and learned. Where “Come Home,” another patch of scorched earth to close the record, continues to ferment her particular brand of torch song, “Everyone” punctures the mood with a startling dose of funkadelia while also not feeling misplaced or tacked on.
In its poetic simplicity, Oak’s Silver Moon EP is an exemplary masterclass of vocal interpretation and serves as a high-mark in blues and soul music, both working in tandem to her voice that feels otherworldly of a bygone era. Oak has clearly done her homework in honoring the legacy of other matriarchs like Bessie Smith but also injecting the format with a new appreciation and vitality we’ve never seen or heard. She is mesmeric.
