Jolie Holland Albums (4)
What The Critics Say
On her three previous offerings, Jolie Holland mined the deep well of Americana, from classic pre-war blues and country sources to the feel of speakeasy-era popular and parlor songs and originals that echoed all of the above while being caught in the whirlwind restlessness of millennium-edge America. Her songs and instrumentation were like lovers; they represented the iconic places they held in her life as an artist. The Living and the Dead offers a different side of Holland. Where her own sometimes loose and ranging compositions were influenced by those early styles to the point of poetic obsession, the songs here reflect a tighter, more focused musical view while ratcheting up their emotional intensity. Perhaps this is because parts of it were recorded in various cities such as Portland and Brooklyn, with guests who include Marc Ribot, M. Ward, Colin Stetson, Kenny Wollesen, and Jim White; they play alongside her regular collaborators such as engineer, multi-instrumentalist, and co-producer Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Rachel Blumberg. Production aside, it's the songs that reflect the greatest change here, beginning with the opener "Mexico City," where beat generation heroes Jack Kerouac, wife Edie Parker, and Joan Vollmer (the wife of William S. Burroughs whom he accidentally shot and killed in the infamous "William Tell" incident) lay across the protagonist's bed as she strums through a jangly rock tune and asks: "What's that black smoke rising, Jack? Is the world on fire? What's that distant singing? Is it a heavenly choir of the living and the dead?" "Corrido por Buddy" is a gentle yet harrowing memorial narrative about a man she barely knew who went from "beautiful young man on the streets of Austin," to "...a ghost-faced junkie on the streets of New Orleans..." Beginning with strummed electric guitars, drums kick up the emotional verve in the tune though Holland's voice remains relaxed in its drawling delivery. But she implicates herself as culpable too, and wishes she'd not been so shy with this man who treated her with kindness and compassion in her own needy circumstances. She asks with devastating honesty: "What if they only gave you love when you lied? Everything minus one is everything..." The songs could end right here, but Holland is unflinching as the album tenses up even more with "Palmyra," a meditation on the frailty of human relationships and failings of love. Ribot's guitar work here is biting, warm, and razor-wire sharp, contrasting itself with Holland's steely yet world-weary voice. All of these songs reflect the shortcomings of human beings dealing with one another in an honest, intimate, dependable way, and how it's sometimes impossible to endure -- as one is both victim and perpetrator. There are two covers on this set also: the eerie, stripped, disembodied reading of the traditional "Love Henry," (which wouldn't seem out of place on a Tom Waits record), and the set-ending standard within a standard, "Enjoy Yourself," a late-night back porch reading. But even these songs are haunted by something almost dreadful on Holland's shoulder, making her look back at the road in sorrow, and at the present with the kind of resignation and acceptance that true regret brings. Though her Americana roots still shine through in patches, for The Living and the Dead they are stretched to the breaking point. This is a spooky yet beautiful offering by one of our best musical poets; a true outsider trying to come in from the cold. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Jolie Holland's sophomore studio outing for Anti is a leap from her landmark Escondida. While that album traveled seamlessly from genre to genre without trying, Springtime Can Kill You moves at a slower, more labyrinthine pace toward an end that only Holland could conjure. There are many artists these days stepping deep into the rich tradition of American roots music, whether it's country, blues, folk, or gospel. To her credit, Holland is looking for something even more mercurial in her songwriting and cover performances: the American parlor -- or living room in the era before television when the radio was its centerpiece: it was the terrain where many voices, experiences, and stories from near or ghostly far came to life. Here,she articulates them in the present, often in the first person, as musical languages and as well-worn fables from life's margins. Holland's voice, always so original, sounds like it comes from some other bygone era, yet utters itself in contemporary terms; it is the anchor on which all this beautiful eventide music turns. It can be weary, tired, shy, and sly; it can be deeply divided and ambivalent; it can be sexually charged with the notion of conquest and discovery, and in its sultry, suggestive drawl it reveals even as it conceals; it's ready for the next lover's embrace or the challenge of finding it. Still at other times, it's full of grief, or intimate regret, or wide-eyed wonder and innocence at what reveals itself in the moment. It's a voice where there is no grain, only a rounded disclosure that carries within it all the moments the words were born from. Whether she's writing original material or covering traditional tunes -- on this set she does a gorgeous reading of "Adieu False Heart" -- the effect is the same. It's intimate, like a secret told readily. And to further embolden herself, she's recorded portions of the disc in front of a small audience, and cut most of the music live from the floor. She engages country music, jazz, skeletal rock, swing, and '30s style pop in her original compositions as well as on a pair of stunning covers: poet and songwriter C.R. Avery's "Crazy Dreams" and Riley Puckett's classic "You're Never Satisfied." Other tracks offer stylistic or inspirational nods where they're due, such as on the country blues tune "Moonshiner," where she offers props to Freakwater and Memphis Minnie. Leisurely guitars, piano, horns, percussion, bass, and very subtle electronic flourishes illustrate Holland's sung words; their irony, their desire, their sadness and regret, and their slightly crazy, visionary illuminations. A listen to the opener, "Crush in the Ghetto," reveals a love song that looks at squalid surroundings as they've undergone a transformation through loopy joy and the skewed perception of the protagonist who is quietly, yet ecstatically wrecked by love: "It's a beautiful morning in the ghetto/Finer than the day before/The ants are crawling over my pants as if to say/they know where the honey is..." The heart of everyday life is illustrated in images of children crying on buses, high growing weeds that bear witness to "birds of paradise" in gentle singsong style that is illuminated by a shimmering B3, French horn, bells, guitars, and more. The title track is a slippery, rhythmically complex jazz tune. The drums swing, all cymbals and sheen, against the vocal. A human whistle sounds gaily from the margin. Holland refuses depression's darkness in her vocal as a four-note piano vamp in between refrain and verse, gives her fuel: "Don't you see we're all hurt the same way? So get out, get out of your house....If you don't go get what you need/Something's going to break on the inside..." A baritone horn plays an interlude in unison with that whistle to underscore this small but revelatory truth. "Stubborn Beast," is a skeletal songwriter's manifesto, set to a country waltz with Keith Carey's lap steel and a brushed drum kit lifting the guitars and vocals; it's a confessional shoulder shrug. "Ghostly Girl" is a country song from the other side of closing time, sung by the performer in the mirror in a cheap hotel. It's sad, wistful, and resigned. "Mexican Blue," another love song, closes the set. Holland's poetic lyric embraces everything in images -- "I saw you riding on your bike/In a corduroy jacket in the night/Past the hydrangeas blooming in the alley...When I lay beside you in the sleepless night/And when you dreamed my guardian spirits appeared..." -- a tiny glockenspiel enters, and underscores the wonder and gratitude in the verse. Electric guitars come razor-like and wind their way in; Holland's voice greets them mid-swell near the end: "I'll remember all the dreams and mysteries/You have born in your crystalline soul/That you sing from your golden throat/That you shine from your sparkling eyes/That you feel from the goddess in your thighs/You're like a saint's song to me..." And after its final words, it just ends. Springtime Can Kill You holds all of its stories, emotions and contradictions, like a multi-colored, roughly stitched quilt, made from well-worn blankets, shirts, and pants. It offers comfort, strength, and warmth, collecting all the stories that came and went, leaving something of themselves behind . ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Escondida is the actual studio debut by Texas-born singer/songwriter Jolie Holland. While critics and music fans alike lauded Catalpa as her "first" album, it was never actually intended for release. Anti issued it after the volume of reviews reached fever pitch and Holland could no longer keep up with requests for it. As such, Escondida is a very different recording. Not as drenched in Gothic southern images and architectures, Escondida offers an even more evocative portrait of Holland as an American traditionalist who uses history as the framework for her new direction; she is not an Americana songwriter. One need go no further than "Sascha," the opener, for evidence. In beautiful early swing vernacular, complete with self-played Piedmont style guitaristry, Dave Mihaly's whispering snare brushes, and Ara Anderson's trumpet loping languidly in the background, Holland offers a love song as humid as a summer night full of stars and quiet front porches. It's startling because it is at once so classic and yet so wonderfully foreign. Her voice evoking Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith without imitating either, and her words coming from the heart of her own 21st century. Contrast this with "Black Stars," which follows it. Featuring only guitars and cymbals, it's closer in feel to the material on Catalpa, yet Holland's voice comes from the land of the ghosts; where the spirits of jazz singers and blues singers jointly crooned in the streets of Old New Orleans. Likewise, Ma Rainey might have sung the blues line in "Old Fashion Morphine" if she and Tampa Red had been accompanied by Sidney Bechet and Kid Ory in a late-night swing session. Gospel, folk, hints of early country music, and swing lie down together and kiss, languidly caressing one another in this blend of organic, sultry, sexy American blues. With her eclectic band -- which includes banjo boss Enzo Garcia on musical saw -- and lyrics that are both full of irony, pathos, and sly humor, Holland offers listeners a loosely constructed yet deeply moving tour through her mystical and esthetic archetypes -- the popping vocal and drum jive tune that is "Mad Tom of Bedlam"; the deep, bottom-land acoustic blues of "Poor Girl," that touches Blind Willie McTell, the Mississippi Sheiks, and Rosetta Tharpe; the Civil War melody that lies at the heart of "Faded Coat of Blue" -- and rewards them with a listening experience that is singular, startling, and soulful. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Most know Jolie Holland as a member of Vancouver's the Be Good Tanyas. Catalpa is her first album, but it wasn't recorded as such. It had been a demo recording passed around to fans until Neume reviewed it on the internet. The venerable upstart label Anti has given it the proper release it deserves. Holland is a native Texan, and it shows in her songwriting. Her images are rich, though stark and Gothic; they sound transposed. While her worldview is mostly modern, its articulation is rooted in a mythical, metonymic America that ceased to exist long before Greil Marcus ever thought about writing Invisible Republic. Catalpa is a place of scribbles and ciphers. Holland's songs are etched out of encounters and experiences that are mercurial, fleeting. As evidenced by "Alley Flowers," a love song, the present and the past intermingle, where street corners and figures like Jesus and Zora Neale Hurston are evoked as relational archetypes, effortlessly. An acoustic guitar played repetitively is colored by bells in the same way Mickey Newbury used rain, as a device to remember and to intimately tell the object that this story is whole, complete, and utterly true in this moment. A pulsing tom tom hangs the tune in the hallmark of memory, haunted, hunted, rooted in the moment, though that moment may have come and gone decades ago. On "I Wanna Die," the spirit of the Carter Family is invoked with a beautifully sung two-part harmony, and a muted banjo played by Enzo Garcia. The song is dark, end of the road Appalachian country, and in the grain of her voice one can hear Holland as every tired, homeless woman who has ever wondered how she slid so far into despair. The sound of a singing bird ushers in the "Periphery Waltz." Accompanied by her haphazardly strummed acoustic guitar, she sings: "I left my home in the church, I left my home in the suburbs to wander/ I did it all for my dreams /And the star that I followed fell from the periphery/-the street lights slipping down my windshield fell like falling stars." This wanderlust is not romantic, it's necessary for survival, and in the fragility of her singing lies the courage of a lioness. There are covers on Catalpa too. "The Littlest Birds" was written as an addendum to a Syd Barrett song and he's listed as a co-writer. Holland sets William Butler Yeats' mighty poem "Wandering Angus" to music as well, and she does a mean cover of Hattie Hudson's "Black Hand Blues." The set closes with "Ghost Waltz," where Garcia's banjo and Holland's guitars entwine in a lilt worthy of Ralph Stanley. And, like Stanley, she sings with a forlorn authority that is gracious and tender: "You are so kind to be civilized/don't think that I haven't noticed/I've been too sad to think and too sick to care/but someday I'll meet you in the cold midnight air/I've been a ghost in houses I've loved/I've been a stranger to heaven above, but as for the world below, this is the one I know, my poor beloved home." And into the ether the tune disappears, leaving its ghost traces in the heart and mind of the listener. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
