Album Review: Michelle Branch - The Trouble With Fever

Sometimes, an album will teach you things about a subject you don't know all that much about. Other times, an album will leave you with more questions than anything, making you wonder if you have been in the dark all along. That's the way I feel after listening to Michelle Branch's newest record. It serves now a far different role, but it was written as an album of love songs to her husband. As Whitesnake once posed; Is this love?

I ask that, because I don't hear love in these songs. I don't even hear a sound that makes it sound like Branch is even warm to humanity, as a whole. The album is dripping in a hollow tone, dripping with an echo that feels cold, punctuated by synths that break through the noise like a crying child in the middle of the night. Ok, maybe it does take love to embrace that bit of life, but that's not the way it sounds listening to the album.

"All You Wanted", from her first album, is one of those songs that has hung around in my mind for twenty years. It make my list of my favorite songs ever, and I still pull out my guitar often and strum along to it. While I was never obsessed with "The Spirit Room" as an album (although I do need to go back and give it another chance - I think I was missing something back then), Michelle Branch has always been a nice memory of a specific time in music.

That's what makes this record so difficult to listen to. I know what she is capable of, because I've heard her pull it off so well, and these songs with this production seem to suck the life out of her. The booming aspect of her voice isn't used at all. Her sharp tone that made it sound like she was singing something that truly mattered to her feels absent as well. This record comes across rather dour, and without songs that invite you to listen back to them again. If this is love, it is fleeting, and it is insular. Whatever she is feeling in these songs, it doesn't resonate with me.

Maybe this is a lingering effect of getting involved with the indie-rock scene, where a lot of those people like doing weird things for the sake of being weird. Maybe these songs would sound better if the noise was cleaned up, and a bit more polish was put on the recordings. I don't think it would make much of a difference, but maybe it would be just enough.

As it stands, I'm left confused by Michelle Branch. Not only is this an album I didn't enjoy listening to, and not only is it an album that doesn't sound at all like what it's supposed to be, but it's also an album that leaves me questioning the very meaning and existence of love.

I guess that's something.