JOLIE HOLAND

The slanted enchantments of Jolie Holland's new "Pint of Blood"

By The Burg Staff on Jun. 29, 2011
By Matt Ashare

 Songstress Jolie Holland draws a Pint of Blood

Texas-bred singer-songwriter Jolie Holland has been called a lot of things since her self-released 2003 debut Catulpa — really a bedroom demo — caught the ear of Tom Waits, who nominated it for the Shortlist music prize and helped get her signed to Epitaph’s Anti-imprint, where Waits, Nick Cave, and Neko Case are some of her labelmates. Deconstructed blues, gothic folk, and rootsy Americana are all part of her lexicon. And there’s also something vaguely jazzy about the way she often sings around a melody, like a raven circling in on its prey, soaring with a beauty that’s both devastating and enchanting, gliding from note to note with a natural grace that seems less learned than uncannily congenital.
     Like Waits, Holland is simply too mercurial to pin down neatly. If she were a painter — and she did indeed create the artwork that adorns her new Anti- release Pint of Blood — she might well be considered an “outsider” artist, although she did make small strides toward a kind of slanted and enchanted accessibility when she brought producer/multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily on board for her 2008 album The Living and the Dead.
     Holland’s productive partnership with Ismaily remains intact on Pint of Blood. And the disc’s opening track, the mid-tempo, plaintive, and touchingly twangy “All Those Girls,” creates the immediate impression that they’re picking up right where they left off in 2008, edging ever closer toward the accessible without ironing out too many of Holland’s captivating kinks. Against a country folk backdrop of strummed acoustic guitar, a softly swinging backbeat, and the heavily reverbed distortion of an electric guitar that threatens but never quite delivers discord, Holland’s voice quivers and quakes as if she can’t quite get her mouth around the words. Sounding like a less buttoned down, more adventurous Lucinda Williams, Holland imbues the song’s signature lyric — “I can’t believe you treated me like all those girls/All those sweet girls/Go home to cry/And wonder why” — with a kind of world-weary defiance. She’s certainly mastered Williams’ gift for turning vulnerability into an alluring asset, for bearing emotional scars as a sign of inner strength.
     The disc picks up some steam with the harder-hitting “Remember,” another countrified rocker with a bit more of a bounce to it than “All Those Girls.” Holland sings the first verse so steely sweet that the pleasure she takes in the implicit violence of the song’s narrative is amplified. “It brings a smile to my lips,” she unabashedly admits, “When I think of your fist/Narrowing in on and cracking his ribs.” It’s a track that plays to all of Holland’s considerable talents — her penchant for poetic turns of verse (“Mockingbirds sing at the moon/And the stars fall from the sky/If you don’t catch me when I fall for you/I’m gonna have to remember how to fly”); her uncanny ability to project an aura of toughness even as, in desperation, she croons “Can I stay here ’til dawn?/I don’t know how to get home/My phone is broken and my friends are gone/Can I stay here ’til dawn?”; and the unadulterated, un-pitch-corrected pleasure of her slurred delivery.
     “Remember” is the album’s real knockout punch, and Holland was smart to frontload Pint of Blood with two of her most immediate and affecting songs to date. Like good pick-up lines, they lure listeners into what one might call the more challenging side of Jolie Holland. “Tender Mirror” is an almost painfully spare broken-hearted piano ballad; on the acoustic “June” she says more with her screechy violin than with her softly sung verse. And, yet, there are plenty of other high points here. The heartbreak of the aptly named “Wreckage” (“If disappointment were like a drug/I overdosed again”) is offset by an almost upbeat handclapped rhythm and jauntily strummed acoustic guitar.
      Holland revisits “Littlest Birds,” a song she wrote when she was briefly part of the Canadian folk trio the Be Good Tanyas and included on her first solo disc, and reimagines it as a Rickie Lee Jones-style jazz-pop number. And she closes the album with a hymn-like cover of Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt’s mournful “Rex’s Blues” that brings to mind what Jeff Buckley once did with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” In fact, given her roots, perhaps Holland is best described as her own kind of Texas troubadour.
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