SARABETH TUCEK (SBT) - Joan Of All 2LP

Limited edition double vinyl housed in gatefold sleeve.

Highly recommended.

As Tucek – now operating as SBT – Joan Of All is her first record since 2011’s Get Well Soon, that delay suggesting its existence was never a given.

As she sings on 13th Street’s never-go-home-again lament, Tucek was raised in New York – the mark of Lou Reed is upon her – but she mixes dirty rock’n’roll boulevards with West Coast haze and cosmic innerspace. She started writing songs when she moved to Los Angeles, meeting Bill Callahan through a friend. “I didn’t know that I had made any impression upon Bill because he’s very stoic,” she says, and nearly “passed out” when he asked her to sing on 2003’s Supper. Even heavier validation came after her self-titled 2007 debut, when one of her first gigs was opening for Bob Dylan in Massachusetts.

It has taken until now, however, to make “the thing she is most proud of in her life”. Released on her Ocean Omen label, Joan Of All is remarkable emotional cartography, documenting “the whip and the lash” (as she sings on The Gift) with both analytical cool and almost hallucinogenic intensity. Tucek wears symbolic armour on the sleeve of Joan Of All – a representation of her struggles, of the way women are again “under siege”, and a tribute to her “badass” therapist mother. She quotes Louise Gluck: “The hope is that if you live through it, there will be art on the other side.”

“I didn’t really expect there to be anything on the other side,” Tucek says, “but it turns out there was.”

RIYL: Lou Reed, Bill Callahan, Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey, Pixies