Sarah Blasko
As Day Follows Night
(Dew Process/Universal)

My seat at the 2007 ARIA Awards was so high up and so far from the action that I had to be guided to it by a sherpa. But even from there I could tell that Sarah Blasko was a little bemused as she accepted her ARIA for Best Pop Release of 2007. “I always thought my music was pop,” she joked, her gentle sarcasm echoing around the infernal chasm of the Acer Arena.

It would seem that Blasko has had quite enough of being misunderstood. Her third album, As Day Follows Night, immediately sets itself apart from 2004’s The Overture & the Underscore and 2006’s What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have. Where both of those albums kicked in with a haze of murky vocals, synth and TR-606 beats, the new opener ‘Down On Love’ unravels like an old standard, all dainty piano flourishes and understated strings. It’s Blasko as we’ve never heard her before.

Actually this whole record is Blasko as we’ve never heard her before. There’s a laid-back jazz club vibe throughout, with plenty of brushed snares, meandering double bass and Blasko bending notes like it's Billie Holiday’s business. Though importantly, without - to be clear - the whole thing becoming a self-conscious throwback to burnin’ blue soul a la Duffy’s Rockferry.

The record makes the most of three main elements – voice, bass and drums – without resorting to electric instruments at all. It’s hard not to miss the prog-rock sensibility and Jonny Greenwood textures of What The Sea Wants, but there are new pleasures to be discovered in Bjorn Yttling’s keep-it-real production: the immaculate crispness of the nylon strings on ‘All I Want’; the blunt attack of the piano on ‘Lost & Defeated’…but mostly it's all about Blasko’s voice, which shines in these spacious arrangements. Here Blasko is in her finest form yet.

There are a few surprises in store too: the flamenco stylings of ‘Is My Baby Yours’; a Tin Pan Alley vaudeville number in ‘Hold On My Heart’ (not a cover of the Genesis track, obviously); the bouncy ‘Lost & Defeated’, with strings shivering away in demi-semiquavers as if from the chilly Scandinavian winter; and, even if Blasko refuses to say so herself, echoes of the Wild West in ‘All I Want’ (rattlesnake shakers, clippety-clop percussion and singing saw coyote howls).

The biggest a difference perhaps is that Blasko, who has tended to be willfully obscure in her lyrics previously, lays it all bare here, with refreshingly direct lines like “I never knew it would hurt like this / to let someone go against my wishes…” Lines like these, together with music like this, is tantamount to throwing on the house lights after a little bit too much flickering candlelight. It’s stirring, beautiful stuff.

Darryn King