Music Review: Sarah King, ‘When It All Goes Down’
The rootsy Vermont singer-songwriter digs deep musically and into hard-won experiences to deliver a powerful, emotionally charged album.
Sarah King’s When It All Goes Down album artwork.
Vermont-based Sarah King writes and sings like her life depends on it. You can tell from her songs that she’s been through some serious shit even if you don’t know about her specific trials and tribulations of loss, struggle and grief over the past few years. On her new album, which dropped in late March, she tackles all of that and more with an impassioned, gutsy collection of songs that are a testament to stumbling, suffering, fighting and surviving.
With the perfect balance of polish and raw energy, King melds her blues-rock band roots and the dark-country-tinged sound of her more recent solo EP The Hour, throwing in a soupcon of pop and vintage R&B stylings. The result is When It All Goes Down, her full-length solo debut album (independently released and mainly funded by a successful Kickstarter).
The album reaches some fiery heights, but it starts with a slow smolder on “Lord Take My Soul,” at first a plea for salvation that soon ramps up in intensity and becomes more of an invitation to join the narrator in sin: “Your god can’t catch you if I lead you off that ledge…”
King is fond of flipping the script within a song, as she demonstrates on “Always an Almost.” It begins with a litany of near-misses in life:
Almost won first place
Almost finished the race
Past mistakes were almost erased
Always an almost
But soon the meaning of “always an almost” turns positive as the bluesy power ballad hits its stride:
Almost thought I couldn't let go
But the pain's how you grow
It gets better I know
Always an almost
Those lyrics segue into a quintet of tracks about self-empowerment, sisterhood and coming into your own. “When It All Goes Down” kicks off this song cycle with “They tried to keep me quiet / Don’t know what I been through” and continually circles back to the defiant refrain “I’ll stand up to the devil when it all goes down.” Next, “The Longest Night” is an Americana ballad that hearkens back lyrically and thematically to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” rejecting a lover’s attempt to rekindle a romance gone wrong:
You can’t stand in front of me with that look on your face
Like you don’t understand what’s just taken place
After everything you’ve done to you and me
A driving tempo and ominous drums ramp up the drama and urgency in “Blame It on the Booze,” an offer of assistance to a friend on the brink of a relationship turning abusive: “Next time he drinks too much and he’s pushing you to new lows / He’ll blame it on the booze.” (This being Sarah King, a master of the modern murder ballad, the song ends on an ominous threat: “Next time he drinks too much we’ll help him join his shadow / And we’ll blame it on the booze.”)
“Stronger Than You Ever Knew” takes the pace back down a touch and brings in sweet pedal steel to deliver a more universal, upbeat country-pop power ballad of sisterly support: “No need to hide your scars / You’re gonna make it through / You’re stronger than you ever knew.” Like many of the songs on When It All Goes Down, the music builds to a swelling crescendo that matches the growing emotional intensity. The next track returns to the self-empowerment theme, a triumphant nose-thumbing at naysayers summed up in the title “You Were Wrong About Me.”
Sarah King. Photo credit: Blu Sanders.
King once again includes an idiosyncratic cover (as she did with Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” on her 2020 EP), this time offering a fiery take on the funky, rootsy Led Zeppelin ode to loving a woman who gets around, “Hey Hey What Can I Do.” The track signals a marked change in theme for the remainder of the album, delving into sordid territory in a series of songs where there’s not necessarily a way out, next with “Whiskey Thinking” about (naturally) the irresistible pull of liquor and drunken flirting, which leads into “Pretty Things,” a menacing, possessive love song of sorts (which does include the fair warning “For the love of god beware of me”).
Next, a song King also recorded with her previous band The Guilty Henchmen in 2019, “The Moth,” gets a rootsy glow-up. If ever a song deserved a second life, it’s this sultry, simmering murder ballad about a vengeful woman stalking her untrue lover: “Time measured by heartbeats / Now that I know you’re not mine.”
King ends the album with another cover, “Devil’s Try” by Scott Hawkins, that descends farther into the depths of living dangerously, struggling and barely surviving, but ends with an obstinate refrain that has a never-give-up kind of strength at the core of its darkness: “The devil’s got it in for me / But he’ll just have to stand in line.”
Looking at the sum of its parts, When It All Goes Down has the feel of a manifesto or maybe even a Bildungsroman. Sarah King lays it all on the line for this album—her weaknesses and enduring strength, the pull of darkness and the guiding light of mutual human support, the oppressive forces that surround us all and the indomitable will to keep going, whether it’s by bouncing back triumphantly or by throwing back a shot of whiskey and digging your nails into the side of the abyss to hold onto existence.
Learn more about Sarah King in our 2021 interview with her and in our review of her 2023 show in St. Paul!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is the primary writer, social media manager, podcast producer and event-calendar updater for Adventures in Americana. By day she’s a marketing writer/brand strategist. In addition to playing guitar and songwriting, she writes self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym T.A. Berkeley.
