Review: Tara Craig exposes raw beauty on self-titled album -

Tara Craig moves like a phantom. Her voice charges through the spiraling smoke of existence. Her penmanship is equally as affecting. Just listen to her self-titled sophomore album. Stacked with intricacies, the nine-song project crawls under your skin in its excavation of self. While she boldly pushes experimental boundaries, her lyrics remain raw – as though these confessions and self-extracted lullabies are life and death entries of her human story. Craig keeps the album themes close to the vest, allowing the listener to parse their own meanings and intentions. As if words etched in marble, Tara Craig arrives as a necessary salve to today’s troubling times and a remarkable step forward in indie/folk music.

Craig sets the stage with the moody and serene “Brave Tern.” Her whispers lay the percussive groundwork, with strings sprouting from the sides. A deep-seated yearning oozes from its cracked foundation, rooting the album in place as she continues planting seeds in well-nourished soil. When her voice crashes in like a wrecking ball, it rattles the window panes and door frames. “New Beginning” is the sun cresting the horizon for the very first time. Craig pours out her voice like creamy cement, molding the melody to her will. A radiant performer, Tara Craig uses her sparrow-like instrument with sheer agility. She allows every single emotion to drip from her soul and then wraps you up in its free-falling stream.

Where her heartbeat palpitates in “Phantoms,” bristled with electric guitar and tangled drums, “Radiotowers, Jetstreams” blooms as a vulnerable reflection of her place in time. Throughout the album’s lonesome stretches, the singer-songwriter exposes the neglected recesses of her body and mind as a way to true healing. “I’ve lost so much / I’m not sure I can keep anything,” she weeps with “Forgotten Home.”

What marks Tara Craig’s sophomore effort a necessary life force lies in its lyric connectivity through the pillars of human existence. There’s real misery, sadness, and even rage traced around the album’s edges. Within its musical luminescence, the songwriter charts her own voyage through tumultuous, nearly unnavigable waters. Yet she forges ahead despite it all. The storm overhead crashes and electrifies the surface, clouding the deeper waters in impenetrable darkness.

Do yourself a favor, and let Craig’s magic cast a spell on you.