Jesse Sykes: A Sweet Hereafter to die for

June 20, 7:16 AMSF Music ExaminerDerk Richardson

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Photo by Autumn de Wilde

Jesse Sykes calls her band the Sweet Hereafter. I think of her music as the sweet here and now. It causes you to slow down, the way flypaper puts the brakes on a bluebottle. Best not to struggle. Just surrender and stick around for a while and enjoy the exquisitely gluey sensation.

I've seen the Seattle-based singer-songwriter perform a couple of times—opening for Bright Eyes over at the Berkeley Community Theater and enthralling a small audience in the Carriage House during a remarkable singer-songwriter fest at the Montalvo Arts Center down in Saratoga. Both times I was sucked into a brooding acoustic-electric, country-tinged folk-rock sound that struck all the right chords in my Fairport Convention–, Richard Thompson–, Duane Eddy-, Lucinda Williams–, Marianne Faithfull–, and Neil Young and Crazy Horse–addled musical memory bank.

But the Sweet Hereafter's upcoming San Francisco appearance at the Great American Music Hall takes place in the kind of peculiarly perfect billing that reminds you to hear connections where they're least expected.

Sykes and band are co-headlining with another Seattle band, Earth, which bears the reputation of being the avatar of instrumental doom-metal-drone music. That—and the saga of guitarist Dylan Carlson—is another story, which you can read here.

Suffice it to say, the evening will be an orgy of down-tempo but ecstatically melodic electric guitar. In the Sweet Hereafter's case, the guitar blooms in the hands of Phil Wandscher, long ago of Whiskeytown (the alt-country "birthplace" of Ryan Adams). Wandscher's musical empathy with Sykes' dusky voice and probing lyrics is "telepathic" the singer told me a few years ago. "There is something on a higher level that Phil and I are very locked into," she said, and that's borne out in sonic glory on the Sweet Hereafter CDs, especially 2004's Oh, My Girl and last year's Like, Love, Lust & the Open Halls of the Soul. It's the kind of relationship you can hear between Pieta Brown and Bo Ramsey, who happen to be coming to the Great American Music Hall with Pieta's dad, Greg Brown, on Friday, June 27, and between Neil Young and, well, himself.

In a previous story about Sykes, I quoted the Omar Sharif title-role character of the film Monsieur Ibrahim: "Slowness, that's the key to happiness." The Sweet Hereafter provides an unhurried glimpse of just that.