This music is hard. Not in the sense of machismo or of complexity or of book- smarts or even tunelessness (there's melodies for days), but in the sense that you will come into contact with great pain. It's probably Sarah's, but it might be yours, and as such this disc needs to be handled carefully, as though it glows with some kind of half-life accrued from traumas across a lifetime. Pain, indeed, is one of the ways we can go the deepest, like Fred Nietzsche says (and I'll try not to over-intellectualise, the album doesn't): "Only great pain, that long, slow pain that takes it's time and in which we are burned, as it were, over green wood, forces us... to descend into our ultimate depths... I doubt that such pain makes us 'better' - but I know that it makes us deeper."