Sarah Belkner has an impressive knack for bolstering open, accessible, pop songwriting with little blasts of colour and eccentricity.
One could easily rearrange her debut album's songs into standard piano ballads (and it'd still be semi-decent). But, throughout, Belkner consistently takes a different route. Chance shifts from broken-drum-machine rhythms into funereal brass drones. Trauma's tensile, loping guitar lines are offset by almost arrhythmic keys — and later augmented by parping woodwind and brass. It's a genuinely surprising and delightfully adventurous album. It will be very interesting to see where Belkner takes her work from here.
