Jolie Holland: Escondida : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Jolie Holland's debut disc, Catalpa, was a set of demos released last year to cheers from fans such as Tom Waits. You can hear why on her second album, Escondida. Holland's voice is as pure and direct as a hit of moonshine. The album's intoxicating, soft-shoed folk blues swells with oddball images; on "Black Stars," she reveals that "The moon is wizened/And it is old as a toad in a Chinese story." Holland's grandparents hailed from the same part of East Texas as Leadbelly, and her music embodies a dyed-in-the-wool timelessness that can't be counterfeited. "Darlin Ukelele" is a love song to her uke, complete with pitch-perfect songbird whistling. "Old Fashioned Morphine" offers illicit enticements you won't get from Norah Jones, as a swaggering trumpet evokes the New Orleans jazz of Louis Armstrong and wife Lil Hardin. Best of all is "Damn Shame," a wistful piano ballad with the great opening line, "I hid out on the front porch/I laid up in my mind." You can't help but be drawn to Escondida.