Jill King - Rain On Fire

After recording and releasing two albums while a Nashville resident, Jill King decided she needed to do something and go somewhere else, with California being her destination.  Does this album differ sonically from the first two records?

The album opens with the gentle, upbeat “Beautiful World,” a delicate song of surrender layered over a bubbling brook of a melody.   King gets a chance to show off her sultry side, fairly smoldering on “Undertow.   “I wonder if you have a clue, why I drink my coffee here on my front porch everyday just to get a look at you, “ she asks shyly on the steamy title track, before confessing “I undress you with my eyes.”  The give and take of long distance and grown up relationships are a common theme on this album, which finds King alternately assuring a lover she will always support them in “I’ll Keep Loving You” and wondering why he puts up with everything she puts him through on “Taking Me Back.”  “First love’s a funny thing, like winning the lottery with no head to invest, just spending it fast,” she muses on “Didn’t You Know.”  By far her biggest risk on the album is “Mark on Me,” a tribute to the influence of Robert Johnson, featuring a spoken word intro by Johnson’s grandson and a rap interlude (performed by V Mayz).  What could come off as a painful middle-aged white girl attempt at garnering street cred actually comes across as authentic and touching.  King’s most soaring moment comes in the powerhouse gospel  ballad a song about death, revival, and life that finds the singer coming down from the ecstasy of her childhood faith with “most times its hard to feel it, cause most of us are scarred.” 

                Jill King does move away from her neo-traditional country sound on this album, which is more a flaw of the album as a whole than any one of the songs.  She has a tendency to fall into that mid-tempo California-Rock-meets-Lilith-Fair  gap so many female singer/songwriters tend to gravitate towards.  For the most part this approach works for the individual songs, as she still adds some layers of production or melodic riffs that keep them from all sounding the same.  For the purists who miss her in all her former twangy glory, there are places she could have plugged in the fiddle and banjo.  And, it must be noted, bands like The Duhks have found ways to incorporate traditional instruments with experimental music, which means that King likely could have as well.  And, in all honesty, All I Want is a nearly great song that fairly begs to be underscored with a solid steel guitar riff.  In the main, each song on the album is pretty and well constructed.  The album as a whole, however, feels a little bogged down with each song approximately  the same tempo and containing the same lush, wall of sound level of production.

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