Performing Songwriter, October 2001

Willow
Sweet Dark Demon
Produced by Tucker Martine

Willow’s second self-released effort, Sweet Dark Demon, is a rich, thickly textured affair. This Seattle-based artist’s music lingers in a stark, blackly outlined winter landscape with shadowy, whispering instrumentation and fluid melody. The record hovers somewhere around folk, but with gothic tinges and bell-like guitars chiming throughout. Willow’s voice, reminiscent of Natalie Merchant and The Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler, is as warm, lilting, and alluring as they come. Sweet Dark Demon is haunted and haunting, shot throughout with a deep, glimmering liquidity. Unlike most goth-tinged work, Willow’s music is injected with life and, even at its most funereal, a certain quality of hope.

The musicians Willow has brought together are as soulful as they are skillful and, along with Tucker Martine’s (Bill Frisell, Farmer Not So John, Aiko Shimada) production, bring a subdued, murmuring Cowboy Junkies effect to the songs. Willow herself is an adept and insightful songwriter whose lyrics struggle with faith, love, and weather in a distinctly poetic and cinematic style. For such serious music and serious delivery, Sweet Dark Demon is deliciously free of self-importance or grandiosity. Instead, it comes off honest and profoundly simple.

© 2001 All rights reserved.