Native Harrow – Happier Now
Loose Music – 2 August 2019
Although this is her third album, the first for Loose, I confess to not having previously been aware of Native Harrow – Devin Tuel and musical partner Stephen Harms. Based in Upstate NY, classically trained singer Tuel spent almost 20 years as a ballerina, a discipline evident in the grace in which she crafts her melodies and vocals, both of which, aided by the vintage mics provided by producer Alex Hall, evokes a 70s Laurel Canyon feel with inevitable early Joni Mitchell comparisons surfacing, although the likes of the loose-limbed uncertainty-themed album opener Can’t Go On Like This suggest Sheryl Crow is a possible influence too.
Early Mitchell is more obviously evident in the breezy How You Do Things with its percussive swing and time signature shifts, Blue Canyon’s sparse, jazzily drifting love song to California and the dreamily open-skies title track with its pulsing bass undercurrent.
While the retro tag is an easy one, timeless would seem a more fitting description for Tuel’s music, the slow sway organ-backed Something You Have (“about a relationship where there is an unbalanced amount of focus on one person”) introducing a gospel feel while the edgy riffs and drum patterns of Round and Round draw more on the era’s jazz-rock textures. It’s one of the few tracks to elevate the tempo, the album’s overall approach being more relaxed and contemplative, such as the moodily slow waltzing Hard To Take and, another potent Joni echo, the bittersweet Hung Me Out To Dry.
Charting a rites of passage transition to facing the world through the light of experiences undergone, the album closes in sultry mood with the near seven-minute metronomic rhythm Way To Light, a strummed dusty country blues track (hints of Bobbie Gentry) that, punctuated by bursts of slide guitar, muses on material goods as a placebo for emotional stability (“gonna buy myself out”) as it gathers to a vocally soaring climax.
She says that she wanted to share that she made it out of her own thunderstorm. I guess she’s looked at clouds from both sides now, producing an album that shimmers and glows with a warmth and emotional intimacy that’s impossible to resist.