一聽音樂網

Some folks make music because they want to -- others do it because they have no choice. Sarah Borges clearly falls into the latter category, the kind of person whose DNA would read like a musical chart if you mapped it out on paper. Diamonds in the Dark, Borges’ second album -- and first for Sugar Hill -- spells that out in lush detail, with every plaintive vocal twist and every rollicking guitar turn offering up proof that the Massachusetts native knows her way around American music’s roots (and has her own roots planted firmly in some mighty fertile soil). That terrain, like the landscape she and her band, The Broken Singles have traversed over the past few years, is plenty varie -- —taking in scenes as diverse as the roadhouse melancholy of `Belle of the Bar` to the unashamedly guileless romanticism of `The Day We Met.` Diamonds in the Dark -- produced, like its predecessor, by studio whiz Paul Q. Kolderie (who’s helmed classics by Radiohead, the Pixies and Uncle Tupelo) -- harbors impossibly infectious hooks secreted in each and every song. The disc has the rare ability to ensnare those drawn to both unvarnished floors and lace curtains, sweetly-spun pedal steel lines and bare-knuckled drums.