Melissa Etheridge: Skin : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

"Oh, this one's gonna hurt like hell," sings Melissa Etheridge in "Lover Please," the opening cut on her seventh studio album. Skin is a bare-it-all song cycle about a breakup, presumably rooted in her recent uncoupling from partner Julie Cypher. But the particulars of her situation do not overshadow the universality of her message: To wit, love hurts. Etheridge's voice heats up to its familiar boil as she vents, demands, rages and begs, "Lover, please," extending the last word with a held, heart-rending note. After that hotblooded opener, she turns circumspect, and her voice drops to a conversational simmer as she ponders it all - her old love, her new life and the hard truth that "sooner or later, we all end up walking alone."

The ten songs are mostly built around Etheridge's diamond-hard acoustic strumming, with judicious appliques of loops and beats. Etheridge blows a plaintive folk-blues harmonica in "The Prison," a harrowingly sad number about being trapped in one's own skin, and imagines a seemingly unattainable bliss in "I Want to Be in Love." But by album's end, she's worked through the grieving to proclaim, "Something inside is coming alive." Both cathartic and redemptive, Skin cuts close to the bone.