Review: Hello June Find Their First-Person Voice on 'Artifacts'
As the album's title might suggest, Hello June's Artifacts digs deep. Bandleader and primary songwriter Sarah Rudy explores the full range of emotion with these songs, joyous, sad, angry. But it's the nuances between those strong emotions where Artifacts works best.
Working with producer Roger Alan Nichols, Rudy took a much more raw approach to songwriting than on Hello June's self-titled 2018 debut. That album took an almost third-person view in its songs. Artifacts is intensely, aggressively first-person.
Lead single “Interstate” shows just how personal Rudy is willing to get. Written about her father's death six years ago after a lengthy struggle with addiction, it's a song that anyone who lost a parent too young will relate to. “I don't know if I'd make you proud,” Rudy sings, “but I'd really like the chance to try / I know we don't see eye to eye / But what I'd give to pick a fight.”
The album's highlight track is “Faded Blue.” A driving guitar rocker with a Heartbreakers vibe, it's the tale of a dying romance, and the questioning that comes as it fades. Did you do enough? Did they? Should we have tried harder? Or is it just destined to be “faded blue?”
One of the more interesting bits of songwriting on the album is opener “Sometimes.” Written for Rudy's newborn nephew, it doesn't take the saccharine “the world is yours for the taking!” tack most songs of this type devolve into. Instead, Rudy gives her nephew a more real, if still hopeful, view of the world he's been born into. “Sometimes they'll break your heart / Sometimes you'll break your own.”
The album's one cover is John Denver's “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” A good cover should bring something new to the table and this one does. It's slowed down considerably and delivered with a melancholy not present in the original. The result is a song that's more nuanced than Denver's. Here the song's narrator seems to pine for “almost Heaven, West Virginia.” There's an undertone of regret, like coming home might not be an option or, if it is, it might not be a good idea. It's a lot to cram into what was a fairly unassuming light rock ditty in its original form, but it's successful.
The songs on Artifacts bounce from guitar rock to country to folk to synth-drenched tracks, but the album never loses its place. Sometimes there are advantages to having only one songwriter in a band and Rudy's distinctive writer's voice is the thread that links all of these songs together when, taken individually, they might sound like they don't even come from the same album. I don't know if the genre “album-oriented rock” exists anymore or not, but it fits Artifacts. The singles are fine, but this is an album that should be experienced as an album to truly be appreciated.