Customer Reviews

Escondida

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm not objective- Jolie Holland and her music make me crazy. I don't think of Escondida as a cd that I listen to, I think of it as a place that I go and that I need. I think there are people who get religion and can't get enough of it- they've felt the holy spirit roll down their spine and out their toes and now- nothing else will do. That's how I feel about Jolie. Before her I was a skeptic, but honest to god I've been converted and now I'm a mystic.

There's a reason Tom Waits picked Catalpa, Jolie Holland's first album post-Be Good Tanyas, for the Shortlist Music Prize last year: it's original and beautiful and uncompromising. Escondida is Holland's first studio album. Less rough hewn than her all-demos debut it's just as rooted in her spooky, sultry terrain of old-timey country and Left Bank street jazz, with a little more weight on the latter this time. Her voice, while it can evoke a young Billie Holiday, is all her own and straight from Texas. It slinks, curls and arches like a cat with the run of the place. It's exquisite, like a good jazz trumpeter improvising her way through the woods or around town or up a dirty flight of stairs. (In that sense she's a lot like Billie Holiday). And she's backed up by musicians who know how to dance with her and lyrics that ache and flicker with implications. ("Well, I used to be an angel, now I'm just like everybody else/ Used to be an angel, now I'm just like everybody else/ I left my wings in the gutter/ And my halo is lost . . . dusty on a shelf") Besides playing guitar, ukelele, fiddle, and piano herself, Holland can whistle like a dream. Let's hope this is just the start of a decades-long career. Even if it isn't she's already added to the stock of the world's beautiful sounds with her these two albums. Amen.

I'm trying to think of a comparison to other artists that describes Holland's work on this album, because that's how I tend to describe music to other people. In this case, it's very difficult and, invariably, someone will disagree. Maybe it sounds like Patsy Cline doing a Billie Holliday impersonation (or vice-versa) covering a Tom Waits song. Or like Over the Rhine covering Joe Henry songs. Like I said, it ain't easy to describe.

What IS easy, however, is stating that this is a great album. Jolie has a voice that isn't easily captured in the low-bandwidth Amazon samples (it is SO much better!). This is an album full of quirky tunes, even the silliest of which are rendered with an odd kind of beauty.

Like Norah Jones, it's a little bit country and a little bit jazz. Unlike Norah Jones, however, it's also a little bit weird, in the best sense of that word. It's admittedly not the best comparison, but this music doesn't really compare to much that has come before.

Jolie Holland is a great singer. She's a very unique songwriter. This is a great album. Sometimes you just gotta take a chance, and this album is a chance worth taking.

In terms of sheer quiet beauty, Jolie Holland's Escondida is unrivaled this year. The darkness that is achieved here is quite stunning. The melodies are singularly beautiful, doing so much with such linear arrangements. Just imagine prime Cat Power with a jazz alt lean, and you'd have a good reference point to use when listening to Escondida. The songs, while simplistic, are quite intricate, with surprising bridges and shifts that are gradual enough to miss if you are not paying attention. The quality and detail alone makes the songs feel unpredictable, even though they are quite conventional when you really look at it. She did cover two old standards, the English "Mad Tom of Bedlam", and the American civil war ode "Faded Coat of Blue" both of which are excellent interpretations, and here they both feel like they could have been her own had they not already been established. "Black Stars" and "Darlin' Ukelele" are both amazing, and are the best example of the easy hush like grace she achieves throughout the album. "Old Fashioned Morphine" is perhaps the darkest moment on the album and speaks to the murkier facets of our souls, highlighting the things that race across our minds when despair is factored in. That song isn't the only example of despair and human longing "Do You?" is another startling representation of that. The slow guitars and retention of certain southern details, contribute well to the album's sensibilities, and the songs on this album, while steeped in blues, jazz, and alt country, all of which can be an acquired taste, enter the ear easily. Escondida is so lovely that this album is easy, and most of the songs are immediately approachable. However, that doesn't mean there is no real meat here. Jolie Holland is an excellent.....excellent lyricist, and there are things about this album that will keep revealing themselves for years, it just won't take years for you to realize that.

Last year's debut disc, Catalpa, made up of demo tracks and home recording merely hinted at what was possible for Jolie Holland to accomplish given a "real" album to work with. Here, in her first solo studio effort, we redeem that promise... in spades.

This is not your average debut work, either. Ms. Holland wears her musical influences on her sleeve and here we get songs in the mode of Basie or Ellington--this is, of all things, a stealthly recreation of that variety of New Orleans jazz mixed with more modern folk sensibilities, along with some C&W influence and basic guitar-folky sounds.

Refreshingly, although the music and musicianship is excellent, even fastidiously so, it is Holland's unique voice that is featured, in each song and in a variety of inflections, accents, and lilts, and rightfully so. We get a unique voice, but we don't get a single, repetitive sound. Rather she uses her voice and the music to make an upbeat, fresh, clean, and delightful mood that just oozes and slurps around some nice songs.

This isn't a perfect album: the back half of the disc is less well-honed. On the song Do Ya she can't quite hold the Nashville accent. There is a poorly delivered profanity that clashes with a song. I'm not a prude, but don't just swear for "effect". Nonetheless, this is a very very good effort and I'll still play this disc in ten years. Brilliant.

I've had "Escondida" on the car cd-player for 5 days non-stop...I'm driving in circles round the city like a moth captivated by the light. Need to give up Jolie and check myself in to dry out at the Obsessive Listeners Rehab Clinic...
Yes, to give out a point of reference, Jolie has that warm butterscotch trumpet tone of early Billie Holiday curling around her notes and haunted with the sweet moan of Skip James. The sound rises up from lonesome highways, trainyards, the mist-tangled hills of Appalachia and other forsaken places. The phrasing and lyrics verge on the unconscious slipstream like Van Morrison on Astral Weeks - music that pours out naturally, defiant of the expected measure. She can be whimsical and heartbreaking in the same song and it rings true. We're listening to whispering lovers and then it's about a toad in a Chinese story and I'm following her down any path she takes me.
Her choice of musical support and arrangements is original - atmosphere wins out over virtuosity and clutter. Jolie's voice floats dreamlike over ukelele, marimba, and musical saw in "Darlin'Ukelele" and swings a traditional tune into a Beat nursery rhyme, flying solo alongside her drummer on "Mad Tom of Bedlam".
Jolie says in an interview (and i paraphrase) that when you get to the highest level of the great musician-creators and innovators, for example Ray Charles, (and I would add Fred Neil, Nina Simone, and Van M.) good music is just good music and genre is irrelevant. She has absorbed a variety of traditions but isn't afraid to take some risks; avoiding the "slick" to be herself and let the chips fall where they may. The result is inevitably beautiful.

"Escondida" has become to me what Nora Jones' debut album was a couple years ago...a constant visitor to my CD player in the after hours of on the right side of midnight. Jolie Holland sings in sleepy Texas drawl that often understates her command of blues and jazz singing. Some have compared her languorous phrasing to that of jazz great Billie Holiday. Jolie's talent is common to most great interpreters of jazz, she knows how to savor precisely the right syllables and words to craft her own distinctive style. Like Ma Rainey or Billie Holliday, she understands that style is as much about what you don't sing, as what you sing.

Jolie Holland was a co-founder of the Vancouver based female performing group, The Be Good Tanyas. As talented as her colleagues in the Tanyas are, I always found myself eagerly awaiting the 3 or 4 songs Jolie sang when I listened to the group. Both of Ms. Holland's solo albums, like the Tanyas, are rootsy statements without the clutter of post-production enhancements. The CD almost sounds like a lost relic from a well recorded Library of Congress field session from the 1950s or 1960s.

All twelve of the songs on "Escondida" have deep roots in the blues, jazz and traditional folkways of American and European music. One song, "Mad Tom of Bedlam" is as reworking of old British Isle folk tune about the 15th century Bethlehem Insane Asylum (popularly nicknamed Bedlam)in London. Jolie reworks the lyrics and the ancient Celtic music to shape "Bedlam" into bluesy ballad. "Faded Coat of Blue" is a civil war tune and an ironic comment on the patriotism of "Rally Round the Flag Boys." All of the songs written by Ms. Holland have the evoke the front porch familiarly of public domain songs. "Old Fashioned Morphine" is clever reworking of Blind Willie Johnson's "Wade In the Water", an ancient gospel tune she subverts into praise for the joys of opiated living (with a disclaimer for taking her metaphor too seriously). The lyrical elegance of "Sascha" and "Poor Girl's Blues" reveal Jolie Holland's considerable gift for poetry. There timeless quality of her songwriting that invites comparisons to fellow roots music composers like Lucinda or Gillian. "Escondida" is one of those rare CDs that will improve with age like a fine vintage wine. It's one of the best releases in 2004, and a vintage to savor for many years to come.

I'd like to give it more stars if I could. This is an incredible album that I cannot recommend highly enough. It's hard to explain in words all the wonderful sound qualities of this album, the instrumentals and Jolie Holland's vocals -- all create an eerie, haunting and enchanting soulfulness. The music is kind of jazzy, bluesy, folksy -- simultaneously old timey and cutting edge -- like something from an alternate universe and like nothing you've heard before. Every song has a unique quality and vibrancy, yet all flow together flawlessly. Old Time Morphine is a dark, playful irony on the traditional song Old Time Religion. Darlin' Ukelele is a dreamy sweet tune. Finally, I absolutely love Jolie Holland's beautiful and mesmerizing singing voice -- rich, intricate and strange. This is music at its best.

If you start with her debut album, "Catalpa", you'd think that Jolie Holland is simply too primitive and precious to join us out here in the land of running water and cell phones (this is NOT a criticism!) But no, she comes right out into our world with her first fully-produced recording. The weary tone of "Catalpa" gives way to a world-wise cynicism - again, not a bad thing. The simple guitar-percussion sound, with a powerful jazz inflection, dances the same path where Tom Waits staggers, if that makes any sense. She's a major talent and well worth watching, now and forever.

I Walked into a record shop in new zealand Jolie Hollands CD was Playing, comments made, that voice is so different wow people standing around listern to most of her cd. they played faded coat of blue 4 times!!! and goodbye california they trashed also. out of the 12 people listerning 7 brought this cd there are a couple of crap tracks but over all Brillant. i hope we hear more in the future from this very special artist. and that voice !!!