SARAH NEUFELD
SARAH NEUFELD
The Ridge A flurry of anxious violin strokes opens The Ridge on its eight-minute title track, rushing headfirst into a climax of splashing cymbals and echoing vocals, conjuring visions of acid-soaked Western landscapes and wide-open country. It’s strangely, wildly accessible pop minimalism weirdness: deep tension runs through the album’s main artery, constantly pushing and pulling between hypnotic repetition and spilling, tripping and exploding all over itself. With The Ridge, Sarah Neufeld — joined here by Arcade Fire bandmate Jeremy Gara on drums — establishes herself, again, as one of Canada’s most exciting and singular composers. The album’s greatest strength lies in its cinematic quality. Every song feels like a scene in the bigger dream The Ridge represents as a whole, with tracks like “Chase the Bright and Burning,” with its sparse, flat drums and Neufeld’s airy howl evoking suspicious calm, or “From Our Animal” pulling a dramatic breakdown from its bare rush of stark violin. Blood comes to a boil on “A Long Awaited Scar” and bubbles over into a run-for-your-life chase and escape. Finally, “Where the Light Comes In” draws the curtains gracefully, with Neufeld’s sweeping strings tak- ing The Ridge’s glorious wilderness to its reckoning with soulful melancholy. (Paper Bag, paperbagrecords.com) MATT WILLIAMS
WAS THERE A GOAL REGARDING HOW YOU WANTED THIS RECORD TO SOUND?
You know, maybe this is backwards, but I usually start from a place of, “What am I interested in musically?” That comes from a very curious, creative exploration kind of zone. Once I hit upon a feeling that I want to dive into, I go down a rabbit hole. The composition that I started with was the title track, “The Ridge.” I was putting one foot in front of the other, compositionally, and I found that opening figure really exciting and kind of moving, so I took it where I felt it wanted to go. I was feeling really — I want to say there’s an impulsive, carefree and light-hearted energy to the record, or at least the process that I was involving myself in. It felt really connected to the idea of youth energy, not as if I was reliving my teen years, but there was something that kept coming back, a character in there that reminds me of something to do with being in your late teens, this crackling, sparkling on-the-edge-of-something energy. STEPHEN CARLICK