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Jolie Holland - The Living And The Dead
| Courant |
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Vance Gilbert is typically called a folk artist, which is too narrow a slot for someone whose material is so ripe with dynamic twists and flourishes concocted from multiple source genres. "Up on Rockfield" is an exercise in versatility for the Massachusetts walker of vocal high wires, as it uses an amusing concept as an entryway to a series of fluid, far-ranging musical stews. Gilbert approaches each song in another artist's manner, inevitably getting a kick start from his limber singing voice on the Tom Waits-themed jazz lilt of "Old Man's Advice" and organ-draped rock sway of "Whatever Louise Wants." His elastic vocals are well served by what he declares to be a mash-up of Al Jarreau and Lynyrd Skynyrd on the percolating hoot "Sweetwater," while he mixes dark contemplations with soul trimmings in navigating sparse Springsteen/Earle acoustic territory on "Judge's House."...full text |
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| Blender |
| Jolie Holland should be redundant: Her fetish for country’s cobwebby corners postdates Neko Case, her mangled vowels and husky torment recall Cat Power’s Chan Marshall and her tales of corrupted innocence follow in Lucinda Williams’s sizable wake. Does anyone need another vocally mannered, boho-soul chick with a lust for the dark side? But Holland’s fourth album—far and away her strongest—is flawlessly executed and fearlessly told. In “Mexico City,” scratched acoustic guitar and a half-century-old backbeat evoke a netherworld between love and remorse, hallucination and grim reality: “Jack and Edie, laying across my bed/Flying high, like the spirits of the dead.” “Palmyra” is a requiem for New Orleans and the sins Holland committed there. Retro-atmospherics guru M. Ward and grizzled guitar genius Marc Ribot leave their dusty fingerprints. Holland leaves behind a trail of her own....full text |
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