Singer, songwriter, and dancer
Haley Dahl adopted the
Sloppy Jane handle as young teen in Los Angeles, where she booked shows with friends on the Sunset Strip. Her theatrical brand of punk rock grew only more performance-minded after the release of the band's 2015 debut EP, a recording that featured a nascent
Phoebe Bridgers on bass and backing vocals. Six years later,
Sloppy Jane's sophomore album,
Madison, arrives on
Bridgers' Saddest Factory label sporting a 21-piece rock orchestra that was recorded in an underground cave. Originally conceived as early as 2017 and tracked following a three-year search for just the right acoustics,
Madison is a concept album based on exploring fantasy relationships. With press material referring to it as a "grand gesture," the album was recorded between the late afternoon and early morning hours during two weeks at the Lost World Caverns in West Virginia, with engineer
Ryan Howe hardwired to a mixing board in a car 90 feet above. The high drama begins with a nearly four-minute,
Danny Elfman-esque orchestral overture before arriving at its first song, "Party Anthem," a tuneful, violent fantasy about unrequited love ("Far away, you were half-pretend"), featuring brass, strings, electric bass and drums, and a mocking youth chorus. The title track is another epic entry, starting out as a vaudevillian, drumstick-clicking ditty before a raspy-voiced
Jane, "constantly grieving for the life I was dreaming of having with Madison," maneuvers into sweeping strings balladry and a dramatic piano (and gong) interlude that ends up closing the song like a dream ballet in a musical. Offering a bit of a break from suggested spectacle, the acoustic guitar singalong "Judy's Bedroom" is at the lighter, more intimate end of
Madison's aural spectrum, though the song still invokes murder and capital punishment. The 49-minute production ends with "Epilogue," a macabre acoustic lament that has the narrator wearing a wedding dress to bed and dreaming about her obsession showing up at her own funeral while she hides from the man she hit with her car in the opening song. While
Madison's recording techniques do indeed produce a resonant effect, it's much more an embellishment than a distraction, and in good theater tradition,
Jane's voice is always articulate and at the fore. In this case, "Impressive but not for everybody" may be an understatement on both counts. ~ Marcy Donelson