Sarah Harmer

Description

The first sound you’ll hear on oh little fire is a high-pitched keening, like the shrieking of an unattended phone, or the distant skirling of a ghost on a winter night. Suddenly, Sarah Harmer’s band kicks in, with drums propelling a gust of rock more forceful than anything she’s played since her mid-‘90s days with rambunctious Kingston rockers Weeping Tile. On oh little fire, her first album in five years, Harmer sounds reinvigorated and positively charged. In the years after touring her last studio release, the Polaris Prize-nominated I’m a Mountain, she set music aside to focus on political and environmental campaigns, helping to shepherd PERL (Protecting Escarpment Rural Land), the organization she co-founded. Only on occasion did she venture into the studio, lending backup vocals to artists such as Neko Case, Howie Beck, and Great Lake Swimmer. oh little fire is, sonically, Harmer’s most fully realized album; its layers of textures, from ear-tingling atmospherics to gut kicking power chords, complement the deceptive complexity of her songs. Whether she’s channeling Neil Young through Teenage Fanclub on the likes of “Late Bloomer” or floating away on a stream of Julie Fader’s backing vocals on the evanescent closer, “It Will Sail,” Harmer is always offering new pathways for the listener to explore. Throughout, her voice, clear and precisely emotive, is the beacon that guides you on your way. On oh little fire, she uses the spark of inspiration to light musical fireworks – the kind that glow brighter than the city’s shiniest billboards, that twinkle longer than the hardiest of the country’s fireflies, that linger with you through the gloomiest nights and drive the ghosts away.