Phil Wandscher doesn't get top billing in Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter, but the former Whiskeytown guitar player is by far the most prominent presence on the band's fourth full-length, Marble Son. Upstaging Sykes is difficult: The Seattle-based singer possesses a distinctive voice with the eloquent grain of a young Marianne Faithfull, but with a tendency to strain toward certain notes that suggests a barely contained emotional distress. She haunts the band's first two albums, 2002's Reckless Burning and 2004's Oh, My Girl, which both retrofitted 1990s alt-country influences to a darker Americana. Starting with 2007's Like Love Lust & the Open Halls of the Soul, however, Wandscher has become less of a sideman and more of a bandleader, which is fine: He's a resourceful guitar player who allows these tunes to careen and serve perilously.
This development has its advantages and disadvantages. Like Neko Case before her, Sykes abandoned the more straightforward country-soul of her early albums for a more idiosyncratic style that favors oddly shaped jams over vocal melodies. What should be more personal is actually more impersonal-- Marble Son sounds coded, vague, purposefully obscure. "Come to Mary, she don't mind," she sings on the vaguely Catholic "Come to Mary". The line repeats several times, but it's less a hook than an excerpt from a larger melody. Sykes has never had tremendous range, nor has she really needed it; in the past, she's gotten by on sheer tone and expressiveness. Yet, on opener "Hushed by Devotion" and the folksy "Be It Me or Be It None", she sounds too detached, too cold, such that her voice gets lost in the mix-- never quite as assertive or as evocative as she could be. It sounds like she's holding back, trying to fit into the band, but with an instrument like hers, that seems like driving a plane when you could be flying. By contrast, Wandscher's guitar never sounds hushed or hesitant. It never shies from the spotlight or fades into the background. He's a bold player, which means he can carry these songs by himself.
Marble Son is the band's heaviest album to date, perhaps owing to their recent collaborations with Sunn O))) and Boris. That context makes Wandscher's updates on San Francisco rock riffs all the more intriguing, especially on "Ceiling's High" and "Your Own Kind", whose central themes could have mutated directly from the Dead themselves. On "Hushed by Devotion", the band launches abruptly into a faster jam, propelled into a new direction by a few brazen notes from Wandscher. It's a great moment, but they do the same trick several other times, most egregiously on "Pleasuring the Divine". With every repetition it loses power, emphasizing rather than concealing the band's limitations. Instead of exploring their sound and growing more dexterous over time, Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter have backed themselves into a creative corner on Marble Son-- with a sound so austere it becomes tedious instead of heady, tentative instead of revelatory.
