Jolie Holland: Catalpa : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

When Jolie Holland recorded the songs now found on her debut, Catalpa, she didn't exactly set out to make an album. Thanks to an underground buzz, though, her crafty basement tape/campfire recording is one happy accident of refreshingly underproduced, heady Americana that was never intended to reach an audience wider than the back porch. Taking cues from vocal jazz, backwoods blues and moaning Appalachia, Holland, a co-founder of the equally impressive Be Good Tanyas, has created an unconventional collection of compelling arrangements. Her log-cabin vocals are rife with graceful trills and float ghostlike through crooked melodies on songs that are more mesmerizing than they are individually memorable. Her guitar is augmented by musical saw, bells, harmonica, banjo, human coughs and creaking chairs. Holland seems endearingly haunted by the likes the Carters and bluesmen of yore. She even pays homage to her forebears -- "Nobody sings like Mary Sue Bowen/Nobody prays like Willie McTell/Nobody walks a mile in my stolen shoes" -- while announcing her own arrival into that pantheon.

ROBIN AIGNER
(November 10, 2003)