Touch

by

Sarah McLachlan

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Sarah McLachlan's debut album, the 1989 release "Touch," confirms my working hypothesis that the best artists do not make a giant splash with a debut album who critical and popular success is never again equalled, but instead offer up a first album that showcases a distinctive sound and evidences musical talent. McLachlan was only 19 when the album was recorded, yet she was already showing a sense of maturity well beyond the current crop of singing Lolitas that are strutting themselves in music vidoes.

If you had to hang on label on McLachlan at this point in her career it would be a young Kate Bush (a reference that is hopefully not lost on everybody). In addition to writing and singing the songs, McLachlan plays several types of guitars, piano and keyboards, and also does teh cover design and photo tinting. However, her producer at this point is Greg Reely and not Pierre Marchand, which probably is why this album does not sound like the McLachlan from the rest of her albums, with Reely overlaying her vocals with lots of lush keyboards. This is why the piano ballad "Ben's Song" stands out so much on this album; its simplicitly is in stark contrast to the rest of the tracks.

McLachlan's music is ahead of her vocals at this point. "Vox" and "Steaming" offer up some beautiful melodies (and I like "Sad Clown") but the singing is more of an additional instrument; this is not the sultry vocalist that we know today. Here you are impressed by her vocal range, rather than what she is actually doing with her voice. Two years later McLachlan took a quantum leap forward with "Solace," which evinced much stronger songwriting and was the foundation for McLachlan's initial pre-Lilith Fair cult following. Her debut album is not the first album most of McLachlan's fans are going to pick up, but when they get around to checking it out they are going to find it an interesting look backwards at the first efforts of a young singer, fumbling towards finding her sound.

I bought this CD after "Surfacing", "FTE" and "Solace" so you can understand that "Touch", in my opinion, doesn't have the same calibre as her later works. But this is Sarah's debut CD and considering that she had never written a full song before in her life, "Touch" is certainly a good effort.

The sounds of "Touch" are very Celtic-inspired but also somewhat outdated because this is a 1988 release. However, Sarah's strengths are always in the melodies of her songs and of course, her voice. The lyrics, on the other hand..well I don't understand what she's saying. There are lots of pretty words but with no real meaning and they don't contribute to the song as a whole. I'm no expert in songwriting but I know that I, as a listener, can't relate to anything that's written in "Touch".

Despite the lyrics, I really like the melodies of "Out of the Shadows", "Vox", "Steaming", "Uphill Battle" and the utterly haunting "Ben's Song".

"Touch" is for Sarah die-hards and for those who are interested in her early beginnings.