"Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter – Like, Love, Lust & The Open Halls Of The Soul"

This is the last of six blog posts in a series of female artists or female-fronted bands that will be published under 2024. This last blog post deals with singer-songwriter Jesse Sykes and the band The Sweet Hereafter. The style can be described as "country/folk/rock with a psychedelic bent". The third album "Like, Love, Lust & the Open Halls of the Soul" was released in 2007. Jesse Sykes is originally from New York, but moved to Seattle in 1990. She teamed up with former Whiskeytown guitarist Phil Wandscher. A headline for a review got me interested: "Exploring Gothic Country's Darkest Corners" and another review caught my attention: "Sykes’ delivery is haunting, and the songs are often languid in tempo and sparsely arranged-still they’re not as unrelentingly dark and gloomy as journalistic descriptions sometimes suggest. Sykes lisps, murmurs and incants cryptically, her breathy restraint sounding as though it conceals a wealth of peyote-fueled visions". These well-worded lines takes gothic country copywriting to a new level. The best songs are "Eisenhower Moon", "L L L", "Spectral Beings", "The Air is Thin", "How Will We know?", "Station Grey", "Morning, it Comes" and "The Open Halls of the Soul". The arrangements are lo-fi, lush and dreamy. This is so much better than all the copiers, fakers, imitators, impersonaters and imposters out there. The album isn't particularly rare. You can find an used copy here and there.