This is an album I’ve been keeping an eye out for since September. We went to a lakeside party last August which was, essentially, hosted by local Indie Rock band Roser. And musicians apparently network like crazy. A number of acts from the Lowell, MA area joined in, and the day was filled with music and food and fun.
This is where I first heard Johanna Wacker play. She was a bit of an outsider, compared to some of the others present – a friend of a friend, I think. But she played a nice set of Country and Americana, leaning into Appalachian sounds with incredible ease and comfort for a girl from NYC; it seems her recent heritage stems from Appalachia. And then she let everybody know that there was an album in the works, due out in a month or so if everything went well.
Considering the delay, I’m assuming things weren’t as smooth as she wanted.
And yet, the album is only 24 minutes long. I feel like this speaks to the difficulties that new and underfunded artists face when trying to record and produce their music. Studio time is expensive. Guest and session musicians are expensive.
I still can’t give full marks to an LP when it has the playtime of an EP, but I do try to balance these considerations in my reviews.
Wacker definitely deserves a fair amount of credit. There is a palpable sense of ambition to the album’s construction, though it lacks a bit of polish in the execution — it is her debut, after all. Much of the album rests on Wacker’s voice; her alto vocals are light, pretty, and have the slightest hint of gravel, but more importantly, there’s an overwhelming sense that Wacker really has something to say. She’s an openly gay artist who writes music in a space which, recently, has been hostile to the LGBT community; she’s a survivor of addiction; and she carries a banjo around New York City, so that’s bound to give her some material to work with.
Over its 24-minute run, Garden Over Embers tackles heartbreak, grief, the struggles of sobriety, and of maintaining a relationship through all of the above. Through all of it, Wacker maintains light production and multiple lines of string instruments in an older Country/Americana style. The inclusion of banjo on the album is not, by itself, enough to push the album towards Bluegrass; I mean, its genric stance is, metaphorically, within sight of territory which would be considered Bluegrass, but it doesn’t really cross into that sonic space at any point.
Opener “Revolver Blues” is the most elaborate track on the album, both in terms of composition and lyrics, and serves to really draw listeners in. Much of this stems from the inclusion of two additional artists on the track, Lucy Nelligan and Max Oliva, which gives the track more instrumental complexity and depth. Nelligan also supports on “You Wanted a Cowboy (But You Got Me”) and closer “Stranger Park”; Oliva supports again on title track “Garden Over Embers”. These four tracks are the four best songs on the album, but Wacker also carries her own on the three tracks in which she’s the only credited artist.
Garden Over Embers ultimately has this strange dichotomy where its strengths are simultaneously its weaknesses. The album maintains this light, airy tone from start to finish, which makes it wonderful for relaxing to, but much of that feels like it might have been necessitated by the lack of budget. On a closely related note, the album deals with a lot of really personal, emotional topics, but Wacker’s vocals rarely waver, and I’d really love to see her attack some of these bits and put more of herself into them — Tyler Childers is the best possible exemplar for that. And the album has a solid throughline, but also doesn’t feel fully cohesive.
It’s a solid debut with several bright points. I hope that Wacker is able to leverage it and get herself in front of the right audience, because she has a lot of talent. I also hope that the experience will only help to sharpen her skills; there’s still a lot of rawness and untapped potential here; artists only ever get better after their debut.1
So she can only go up.
Rating: Green
You might try to point out artists whose debut album is their only good one, and I would challenge you to look at what changes happened in their production team or publisher. Wacker has no production team or publisher. So as long as she doesn’t bring in anybody new who has no respect for her vision, this statement will also hold true for her.