Credits:

Sorrow

After leaving Strawberry Switchblade in 1986, Rose McDowell kept very busy. She demoed songs (some she had written for the never-made second Switchblade album), worked in Iceland with a young Bjork, sang backup for Felt and Coil, collaborated with Boyd Rice under the name Spell, and was a member of Current 93. She had a need for an outlet for her own songs, so she and her husband, Robert Lee, formed Sorrow. The idea was to combine Rose’s bittersweet melodies and direct yet ethereal vocals with Lee’s classical and avant-garde influences, and their first album, 1993’s Under the Yew Possessed, shows that their collaboration was a strong one. While it definitely leans more toward McDowell’s side of the equation and some of the songs are cut from the same cloth of knowing innocence as the best Switchblade songs were, Lee brings gauzy atmosphere and gothic baroque strings to the mix. At its best, like on the aching ballad “Forg