Grace Sings Sludge

Grace Cooper gathers storm clouds again for another midnight collection of her terminally haunted songwriting. Cooper’s work with San Francisco’s off-kilter folk group The Sandwitches laid the groundwork for her solo excursions under the Sludge moniker, and she’s been steadily conjuring up the woeful weeping of the lacerated heart ever since. The songs on Life With Dick, exist in a diorama of overgrown mansions, damp mossy undergrowth and barren basements that bounce her sadness right back at her from all directions. Cooper’s production is sparse and purposefully stripped back to let the sound flicker like the only candle in a room drawn off from strangers. Its somewhat heartening when she’s not alone and plucking, but no less full of the ghosts of the past.

On those tracks she ropes in the washtub thump of drums and a weary swing that feels like she’s stepped up to the mic at last call, growling and boiling her way through a set no one can take their eyes off of. Atmosphere is everything on Life With Dick, the air alternating between oddly parched and overly humid, as if the sputtering machinations of a malfunctioning air conditioner control the mood at any moment. Mind you, though, that Cooper is in full control of every smokey note here. The record is no happenstance of resources, she’s created this dark, Lynchian world and we’re set into it only to realize that her lounge has no doors. We’re locked in with Cooper’s sadness and it’s as captivating as it is contagious.




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