With her new single “Trouble Blues,” LaBek gives us a soft moment of truth. This voice appears with unusual warmth, shot through with melancholy, yet refined. It’s the sort of voice that doesn’t just sing the blues, it takes up residence there.
LaBek is squarely in the grand tradition of jazz and blues singing, but she won’t just mime. Instead, she makes tradition into something profoundly personal. Each phrase seems a confession, murmured across a room, and each silence, every bit of space between them, bears its own echo. It was the tension between fragility and strength that made “Trouble Blues” so arresting. You didn’t just hear the story, you felt it around you. It’s a stripped-down, spartan arrangement as effective as it is dramatic. Nothing more than voice, slide guitar, and rhythm, and LaBek sets a time that ends up feeling very immediate. The slide guitar curls around her voice like smoke rising into the air, with the rhythm staking it to earth in a heartbeat pulse. It’s minimalism with intent, the better for the sincerity of her delivery to slice right through.
What sets “Trouble Blues” apart is its candor. There’s no sheen, no overproduction, only the intersection of tradition and feeling. LaBek doesn’t simply look back, she looks forward, showing that this music is as alive and of-the-moment today as it ever was.
For anyone yearning to hear someone who talks through history and from the heart, LaBek’s “Trouble Blues” is an indispensable lesson on how to do so. It’s a reminder of how powerful music can be when it strips down to its simplest, most honest state.