A retro streak runs through most of the music of Sallie Ford, both solo and with her former Portland, Oregon band the Sound Outside. But it’s never been quite as pronounced as on her latest album. Soul Sick is Ford’s second LP since the Sound Outside split at the end of 2013, and it’s a distillation in many ways, as if Ford ran her songs through a rock’n’roll evaporator to remove any extraneous elements. The result is a vintage sound that falls somewhere between a 1950s sock hop and last call in a disreputable rockabilly bar.
Soul Sick’s 11 lean tunes are full of raucous, trebly guitars and a toughness imparted by Ford’s raw voice. Her vocals are a distinctive blend of rugged and plaintive, and something of a calling card, one of those attributes that draws listeners in or turns them off. Either way, Ford knows her strengths as a singer, and she maximizes them here. She lets her voice ring out on “Screw Up” over a thrumming Farfisa, or conveys an itchy sense of urgency on “Get Out,” or captures the anxiety of teen angst on “Failure.”
Despite the jumped-up, hip-shaking music, Soul Sick is not a good-time album. Ford is deceptively self-lacerating, and she’s by turns angry and forlorn throughout. Though she sings plenty about behaving badly, a classic rock’n’roll subject, Ford’s lyrics are anachronistic. With their stark, personal tone, these songs amount to a latter-day form of confessional songwriting that simply wasn’t done in the musical periods she draws from. Her dissatisfaction sometimes veers from restless exasperation, as on the full-throated “Get Out,” to something closer to wallowing in her anguish.
Ford sings with jumpy force on “Loneliness Is Power,” but the lyrics read as if she’s trying to convince herself that the title is true. She beats herself up on “Romanticized Catastrophe” for letting negative emotions run rampant, a sentiment at odds with the doo-wop-esque backing vocals, which Dion and the Belmonts would have coveted. And she’s on the verge of falling apart completely on “Unraveling,” a torchy slow-burner that Ford sings in a brawny falsetto over tremolo guitars and a subtle, muted horn section.
Though she rarely sounds at ease on Soul Sick, the blustery gusto with which Ford and her band tear through the songs turns her discomfort into catharsis. Even when her lyrics verge on self-pitying (“Hurts So Bad,” say), Ford sounds like she is determined to exorcise her demons with a guitar and a tom-tom beat. Her energetic thrashing is infectious, like an open invitation to dance away your own pain. Loneliness may be power, but there’s strength in numbers.
