JENNIFER HSU
The Inner Room
There's more to religious music than Living Water or (shudder) Amy Grant. Jennifer Hsu, ES '97, is out to prove this with The Inner Room, a compelling collection of voice-and-piano compositions largely devoted to the praise of God. Hsu's woman-at-a-Steinway-grappling-with-religion persona superficially links her to Tori Amos (who, incidentally, is thanked in the liner notes), but the two musicians have virtually nothing in common past their prodigious talents at the keyboard. Hsu is unabashedly reverent where Amos is ambiguously rebellious, and Hsu's voice is a rich, full-bodied, lustrous instrument, wide-ranged and bottomless in its resonance, without a trace of Amos' breathy preciousness.
Indeed, Hsu's pipes are what rescue her occasionally hard-to-swallow lyrics; the devotion embodied in "The Prayer" or "Make Me Whole" is brave and bracing, but her portrait of a homeless man who "extends his hand,/says 'sister, can you spare a dime?'" in "The Cathedral" is trite, while the "don't look and you won't see the cloud" aphorisms of "Your Life is Good" are simplistic and a little smug. Still, "Revelation 7:14-17" skillfully avoids heavy-handedness, and Hsu has crafted (and self-financed) a body of pretty, powerful, pertinent songs. Regardless of your religious bent, The Inner Room is one you'll want to visit.
-Caitlin Breen
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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