REVIEW: A Deft Innovator
Ontario-based songcrafter Lynn Jackson quietly released her fourth record at the beginning of the summer, but it would be a shame if such an exceptional album were overlooked in the din of the season.
Soft Stars is sweetly urgent modern honky-tonk infused with lush and unexpected orchestral touches and an intimacy boosted by superb clarion production and Jackson’s pliant whiskey ’n’ honey voice.
As signaled by the title, this is woozy nighttime music, ripe and sensuous, stories of women sharpened by their own desires and moved by a mysterious emotional logic Jackson plays out with precision suspense, lyrically and musically.
A deft innovator, Jackson dangles her rootsy tunes into other genres—a jazzy rag, a vintage U2-ish anthem, a seesawing cello-driven elegiac pop song—without losing coherence or calling so much attention to her experimentation that she lifts the listener outside her carefully constructed starlit universe.