Jolie Holland’s Escondida is an immensely satisfying follow-up to her 2003 debut, a CD full of demo recordings called Catalpa. Holland has roots in Louisiana and Texas, is a founding member of Vancouver, Canada’s Be Good Tanyas, and now is based in northern California. Her music is an idiosyncratic melange of folk, country, blues and jazz. Musically, it sounds like it could have been made in the days of cylinder recordings; lyrically, it’s got one foot in the 20th century, one in the 21st.
Backed by spare assemblies of guitar, piano, bass, mandolin, banjo, ukulele and violin, Holland drawls out her tales of woe and lost love like “Sascha,” about a boyfriend who hopped a train and disappeared; and “Damn Shame,” in which her lover leaves on an international flight. “Poor Girl’s Blues” is a defiant delta blues sung in angelic voice. “Good Bye California” starts out as bare-bones folk, and ends as a gospel-inflected rocking honky-tonker. “O, do you have to go crazy?/Is that the best thing that you can think to do?” she asks another potential lover in the bitter “Do You?” It’s not all hopeless, though. In the jazzy, piano-driven “Amen,” she herself is flying all night to be with her lover, and “Lil Missy” reflects the prayers of the singer’s family for her out on the road.
Holland wrote 10 of the 12 tracks on Escondida. The two remaining are the traditional English “Mad Tom Of Bedlam,” done as a light, uptempo swing jazz song with no backing but brushed snare; and the devastating American Civil War ballad, “Faded Coat of Blue,” which has an intro of muted trumpet playing “Taps” and an outro of Holland playing a plaintive violin air on “Rally Round the Flag,” backed by ancient-sounding banjo.
You can stream the album on Anti- Records’ YouTube channel. Jolie Holland is on Facebook.
(Anti-, 2004)
