BEK JEAN STEWART – WINTER SUMMER SUBURBAN EXILE

Suburbia, always thought of as an artists wasteland. These days is posing as a songwriter’s muse. Think Arcade Fire’s recent album, The Suburbs, romancing the ordinariness. Bek-Jean Stewarts exile is Sydney, and I’m sensing Newtown, where the terrace houses are vast enough for a porch but close enough to that ‘Sydney skyline’ she refers to in the opening track. Bek’s second album is at ease with itself, it salutes a life lived with pain and loss, which only maturity can do. She’s a long way from the busker who stomped the grounds of Central Station many moons ago. Bek writes with her heart on her guitar and sings with that smoky rawness in her voice you’d normally only hear in the mornings. A voice that reminds me of Mia Dyson, only lighter. She does have a darkness though, take Diving Bell, with which she sinks, singing of love ‘like a candle, that when it blows, it blackens my soul’. But on whole, she seems at peace on this album, that heartache is shaded over with a blooming positivity. Like an organic garden, she sounds so very (inner-west) suburban.

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