Plumbiferous Media

As well as hav­ing an incred­i­bly unique his­tory, North­ern Cal­i­forn­ian Jesca Hoop is an amaz­ingly inter­est­ing artist. Given that, it’s no sur­prise that her sec­ond release is noth­ing short of out­stand­ing - from a very lit­eral point of view. There is not one bit of Hunt­ing My Dress that is not clearly and undoubt­edly Hoop, and the result is an album absolutely worth a listen.

Through Hunt­ing My Dress, Hoop’s voice varies between dif­fer­ent tones, from soft and melodic to rich and res­o­nant. But what­ever the tone Hoop takes on, she is always suc­cess­ful at paint­ing the scene befit­ting her music. In one exam­ple, on “Feast of the Heart,” Hoop’s voice rings out as she sings “I wanna eat my heart / Though you make me feel,” per­fectly imbu­ing each word with the emo­tion that makes the some­times immensely odd lines seem to make per­fect sense.

Lyri­cally, Hunt­ing My Dress is excel­lent. Every word Hoop sings is skill­fully weighted, cre­at­ing sto­ries and images that are not only well-written but engross­ing. The con­trast between tracks like the darkly roman­tic “Tulip” and the whim­si­cal “Whis­per­ing Light” is sub­stan­tial, but, as Hoop is just as good at any of the approaches she uses, both are excel­lent. Hoop’s vari­ety of musi­cal meth­ods lends vari­a­tion to Hunt­ing My Dress, mak­ing sure that the album remains inter­est­ing throughout.

That said, each track is unique to such a degree that it may per­haps be best to work through the songs indi­vid­u­ally. The album opens with “Whis­per­ing Light,” a track clearly cen­tered both on its melody, which tells its own story, act­ing as com­pan­ion to the track’s lyrics, and its extremely cre­ative chords. The instru­men­tals them­selves are sparse - a per­cus­sion line and a gui­tar line that’s very nearly a rhythm gui­tar itself, plus just a touch of synth. It fits the pon­der­ing, trod­ding melody and lyrics, and all in all, works excel­lently. Fol­low­ing “Whis­per­ing Light” is “The King­dom,” a folk-based track with com­pletely con­tem­po­rary con­struc­tion (a descrip­tion which also applies more or less to the album as a whole). Espe­cially after the excel­lent tran­si­tion at the 1/3 mark around which the track is built, “The King­dom” turns fur­ther towards a mod­ern sound, far enough that, though it’s hard not to want to, it’s nearly impos­si­ble to fully appre­ci­ate the track. That, how­ever, is not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing.

And then comes “Four Dreams.” From the time­less, care­ful, and yet still con­tem­po­rary sound emerges some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent. The best descrip­tion for the vocals is that they employ “sometimes-harmony,” cre­at­ing a child­like sound (despite what the more mature, plod­ding instru­men­tals would pre­fer). But the track is then cut off short and replaced with “Angel Mom.” This new track is an excel­lent track in its own right, but it is so utterly unlike “Four Dreams” - to enough of an extent that it wouldn’t be entirely sur­pris­ing to find that the album’s track order had been decided by a rabid buf­falo - and that’s a truly ter­ri­fy­ing image. In all seri­ous­ness, while some are cer­tainly bet­ter than oth­ers, every track of Hunt­ing My Dress is ter­rific and unique in its own right, and it’s really only the track order­ing where the album is let down.

Hunt­ing My Dress is, in short, an excel­lent album. With this sopho­more release, Hoop has com­bined a clear sense of cre­ativ­ity with lessons learned from ear­lier releases to cre­ate an emi­nently enjoy­able set of music. Hunt­ing My Dress is well-composed, well-sung, and sim­ply well done, form­ing music that is as enjoy­able at the first minute as the last.

This post is tagged 80-89, Jesca Hoop