No need to ask Norah Jones if her new album is designed to eclipse the ubiquity of her first. There probably isn’t an artist on the planet who could currently shift the 20 million that Come Away With Me from 2003 sold.
Spend a little time in the company of The Fall and it becomes clear that the Brooklyn-raised daugher of Ravi Shankar has little interest in pursuing that route. The brittle snare-crack and spare organ pulse of the opening song Chasing Pirates serves notice that this is Jones’s first album without her troupe of bright young New York jazzers, informally known as the Handsome Band. After the demise of her relationship with their bassist, Lee Alexander, an autumnal melancholia pervades most of The Fall. “If I could touch myself the way you touched me,” she sings on I Wouldn’t Need You, evoking the incomprehensible vacuum of a break-up. No less exquisite is December, a dispatch from “the loneliest place I have known”, in which Jones’s new band fashion a woozy setting for her careworn tones.
When songs are brought into being by this sort of subject matter, it’s tempting for their creators to sound overwrought. On Waiting, though, Jones sounds concussed, the almost workaday details of her mourning accentuated by the sparest of accompaniment. Longtime fans may baulk at the presence of bad-infuence-for-hire Ryan Adams (he co-writes Light As a Feather) and the album’s producer, the latter-day Tom Waits cohort Jacquire King. But there isn’t a single moment on here that could be described as wantonly wilful. Jones is right to stay loyal to her intuitive strengths as a balladeer — strengths that are thrown into piercingly sharp relief by the rough-hewn desolation of Stuck and You’ve Ruined Me.
Even those of us who regarded Jones as a guilty pleasure wondered if she had it in her to transcend the sum total of her influences. It seems our wondering days are over.
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(Blue Note)