Album Review

Sage Francis – Li(f)e

• 1st Jun 2010

Sage Francis has one of the strongest voices of this generation, and he sure as hell isn’t afraid to use it. His latest gem of wisdom, Li(f)e, is harsh, rugged and as full of pleasantries as a hungry dog eyeing up a leg of lamb. His eye-wateringly brutal lyrics hit home with all the force of a meteorite smashing through a greenhouse.

Francis loathes the injustice which runs rife in this modern world, afflicting everyone and everything from the cradle to the grave. The cheapness of life is lamented in “The Baby Stays”, and things do not improve throughout life as you enter a world in which “society is a disease, you gotta learn to live with it” in the ironically named “Worry Not”. But whilst Francis is full of the sadness and loss of life, he is open to redemption and closure, with the final song, “The Best of Times”, admitting that life “has been a long and lonely trip but I’m glad I took it,” and indeed, far from being an album of relentless doom and gloom, Francis offers hope in his revelations, apparent mostly through the musical element of each song.

Li(f)e is certainly a diverse album, but a common element which keeps it from being down in the dumps is the accumulative nature of the musical accompaniment, which builds gradually throughout the song and gives it a feeling of accumulation in sync with the lyrics, and then eventual resolve as the song ends. Each element is very carefully constructed to bring out the most in the others, and the final result is an album which is so slick and perfectly presented that the core message leaps into life and possesses real meaning.