This voice will send a shiver down your spine. Sill transcends the singer songwriter genre with an almost gothic, spiritual quality.What you get on Abracadabra is basically laid back West Coast rock with a touch of country and some far out lyrics. Sill herself called her songs ‘country-cult-baroque’. Listen to ‘Jesus Was A Crossmaker’, Sill’s UFO hymn ‘Enchanted Sky Machines’ or the requiem-like ‘The Donor’ with it’s eerie chorus of ‘Kyrie Eleison’ (’Lord have mercy’).
David Crosby and Graham Nash took Sill under their wings early on in her career and that surely explains some of the country influences on tracks such as ‘Ridge Rider’ and ‘Archetypal Man’. Other highlights here include ‘Down Where The Valleys Are Low’ with its church-meets-soul organ and the quiet but spooky ‘When The Bridegroom Comes’.
‘Abracadabra’ combines Sill’s first two albums ‘Judee Sill’ from 1971 and ‘Heart Food’ from 1973 with a number of demos, live recordings and outtakes. Sill’s voice towers over it all. Whether caught offguard in the studio or in an early, intimate concert setting her soothing vocals combine lust for life with a dry, almost melancholic awareness of death.
Sill had her share of ups and downs. A runaway from California with a history of mixing with the wrong boyfriends and depending on the wrong substances, she was hyped at the start of the 70s as one of the first stars of the burgeoning singer songwriter scene. Her recording career ended abruptly in 1973 after she fell out with label mogul David Geffen. Sill tragically died in 1979 at the age of 35.
Listen to Judee Sill’s second album ‘Heart Food’ and download the album from iTunes.
To buy Sill’s complete ‘Abracadabra’ set on two CDs, please click on the Amazon link below.
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