'The Witness' is a powerful, unflinching, and necessary album

Album review from BMA Magazine

Dorothy-Jane's 'The Witness' is a powerful, unflinching, and necessary album; an artist bearing her soul in the very rawest way imaginable. BMA and Australian Radio Promotion's Vince Leigh reviews. Trigger/Content warning for child abuse, mental illness.

Dorothy-Jane’s new album The Witness documents her harrowing journey through pain and grief following her experience of witnessing her husband sexually abusing a young child. 

This is hellish material for a musical work but necessary for several reasons, most pertinent of all is outlined in one of the tracks Speak Out, with its straightforward appeal to all potential victims of abuse, containing some crucial lines including, ‘You have a right to feel safe’, ‘You have a right to live well’. 

Dorothy’s anguish is sharply communicated via the duel nature of her vocal performances, changing from tortured vulnerability to contemplative maturity with sensitivity, amplified by visceral, determined poise. The missives here are raw, confronting and unfiltered, just as one would expect and hope of such a record, with the organic instrumentation—piano, clean guitars, harmonica, and brushwork drums—all providing an evocative yet unobtrusive soundtrack to the narratives...

- Vince Leigh

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