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Sara Bareilles ‘The Blessed Unrest’ Album Review

The highly accessible work of Sara Bareilles has huge commercial appeal, with crisply sonorous hooks and keyboard-driven melodies that highlight the 33-year-old’s passionate and youthful vocal delivery. On her new album The Blessed Unrest, Bareilles touches on both the accessible pop that made her 2007 single “Love Song” and 2010 album Kaleidoscope Heart chart-toppers, in addition to moodier, more atmospheric pieces more akin to Fiona Apple than radio staples. The Blessed Unrest isn’t quite a showing in perfectionism, but it’s admirable that Bareilles is not following up a #1 album with more of the same. She straddles a line between the highly accessible and artistically engaging, making The Blessed Unrest an album that will surely appeal to old fans as well as new ones. Bareilles proved with Kaleidoscope Heart that she was not intent on becoming a one-hit wonder after the success of 2007 single “Love Song”, and with The Blessed Unrest she further proves that she has her pop-driven formula down pat, with some enjoyable room for experimentation.

The Blessed Unrest was written during a transitioning period in Bareilles’ life, when she moved from her native California to New York and opened herself up to collaborating more with other artists. This is shown immediately on The Blessed Unrest with opener “Brave”, a peppy burst of energy co-written with Jack Antonoff of fun. Clearly, these two know how to craft a song for endless airplay. “Brave” isn’t the crowning achievement of either songwriter, but it’s a nice opener that features the hypnotic repeating keyboard progressions that both Bareilles and fun adore using, in addition to a sing-along chorus that gravitates from the verse’s lead melody just enough to appear separable. “Brave” is one of the safest efforts on The Blessed Unrest, but it’s still easy to see why Bareilles started the album with it. Fans expecting more of the sound shown on tracks like “Love Song” will immediately find themselves at home. Bareilles generally saves her riskier efforts toward the middle and end of The Blessed Unrest, when listeners are already aware of the comfort food tracks serving as appetizers.

Bareilles’ tendency to use repeating piano progressions that glisten and bounce is frequent throughout the album, but it’s rarely utilized as well as “Little Black Dress”, where she laces a suavely delicious chorus with bursts of brass. It’s the album’s most infectious effort, with just a touch of melancholic longing that balances with the effervescence to find a happy medium. More delicate is piano ballad “Manhattan”, which would play well in a smoky barroom setting. Surely influenced by her recent move to the Big Apple, “Manhattan” sporadically drags, but there’s no denying the track’s ethereal beauty – especially around the 01:30 mark where patriotic additions of brass are used. Bareilles enjoys implementing brass into her songs, and the differences on “Little Black Dress” and “Manhattan” shows how Bareilles is able to incorporate them successfully regardless of the track’s overall tone, whether it’s somber or infectiously uplifting.

As the first three songs on The Blessed Unrest show the jubillant and poppy output of previous Bareilles successes, tracks like “Little Black Dress” and the rhythmic synth-laden “Eden” show a cohesive integration of Bareilles’ numerous methods, with the sparse beauty of “Manhattan” being on the other end of the spectrum. Although some tracks simply don’t work, like the constellation-themed dryness of “Cassiopeia”, Bareilles has produced a generally amiable album with The Blessed Unrest, which makes wise choice of including a variety of sounds that will appeal to varying sources. As tracks like “Brave” and “Hercules” are sure to see some lengthy time on the radio, Bareilles’ increasing artistry is shown by bolder yet more overall successful efforts like “Little Black Dress” and “Eden”. At this point, Bareilles’ career path continues to be on an upswing.

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