British singer-songwriter Bishop Briggs’s River, however, is the kind of song you might have heard sandwiched between Paula Cole’s Where Have All the Cowboys Gone? and the Spice Girls’s Wannabe on the radio in the late ’90s. The track’s mix of blues-rock and more contemporary elements like handclaps that morph into trap snares feels like a throwback to the alternative-pop bands that infiltrated Top 40 stations just before the turn of the century. And Briggs’s debut, Church of Scars, delivers in kind, with a series of gothic-soul dirges and blues-inflected pop.
Tempt My Trouble River Lyin' White Flag Dream Wild Horses Hallowed Ground Water The Fire Hi-Lo (Hollow)The looped refrain on River sounds like it was lifted from Adele’s 25, an album that could have, in turn, used some of Briggs’s trip-hop edge. Church of Scars harnesses the soulful blues-pop that Adele has so deftly deployed on hits like Rolling in the Deep. Standouts Wild Horses and Hallowed Ground are defined by canned horns and reverb-drenched vocals, while the classic R&B tropes of Lyin’ and Hi-Lo (Hollow) are juxtaposed by pitched-down and diced-up vocals, respectively.
Spread across 10 tracks, though, Briggs’s formula ultimately reveals itself to be one-note. The incessant box-stomping and earnest belting on Dream obliterates the subtlety of the song’s pensive acoustic guitar strains and gospel humming. For all its sermonizing and church-y fundamentals, the album is largely joyless. Why can’t I let my demons lie?/Keep screaming into the pillow, Briggs laments on Wild Horses. When, two-thirds of the way through Church of Scars, the singer cynically bemoans that there’s more pain in love than we can find in hate, her dour disposition has grown exhausting.
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