REVIEW: Cassandra Jenkins - Play Till You Win

Laura Kerry

“We were singing along / To an old familiar song / When she came waltzing through the door,” sings Cassandra Jenkins on “Tennessee Waltz.” Crooned over a pedal steel sound and a simple, guitar-led chord progression, the song tells a story of love lost to another in a style that borrows heavily from country. It sounds familiar, like an old Americana song that has burrowed deep in the collective consciousness, but as the other tracks on Play Till You Win waltz in, they begin to reflect uncannily on each other. Jenkins’ full-length debut is a balance of old and new—country, indie, and dream pop—so delicate and clever that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Leading the album through this balance are Jenkins’ beautiful and versatile vocals that move through subtle variations on vulnerable (“Shame”), haunting (“Red Lips”), soft (“Hotel Lullaby”), and touches of twang (“Candy Crane”). She has a voice that, like Angel Olsen or Beach House’s Victoria Legrand, can command with quietness. Even as her it dances with cinematic strings, jazzy horns, and wobbly synths, Jenkins’ voice remains in the foreground, ethereal but strong.

For the 11 tracks on Play Till You Win, though, Jenkins credits 21 different people with contributions, and the scale of the effort shows. Assimilating the many instruments used throughout the album into her warm, dreamy sound, the artist plays with a mixture of analog and digital, classic and new. The first half of the album leans old, favoring sparser rock instrumentation in tones and arrangements that establish Jenkins’ version of country, but “Tennessee Waltz,” “Jan Lee Jansen,” “Shame,” and especially “Candy Crane” are not so straightforward; all contain hints of strings or synths that lift them from the earthly genre to the more otherworldly realm of synth and chamber pop.

For the most part, the second half of the album emphasizes that gesture. Synths step further into the mix in “Disappearing” and “Hondas Well,” and in “Hotel Lullaby,” woozy, carnival-like keys lead a dizzyingly good art-pop track. And it is dizzying; as in the rest of the album, it’s hard to know exactly where you are, both sonically and in the narrative of the song. While tracks like “Tennessee Waltz” tend towards understandable narratives, others dip in and out of concrete language and metaphor. In “Hotel Lullaby,” Jenkins establishes a clear image of a hotel room in which someone lies next to her. But the song reveals a dream world on top of the one in the room: “You are nothing but waves / And I break,” she sings.

As with Jenkins’ voice, her writing is simple and powerful enough to carry the listener through any turns. We follow through musings on death in “Jan Lee Jansen,” candy and toys on “Candy Crane,” the psychedelic swell in “Hondas Well,” the heartbreak of failing to see Halley’s comet, and even through the inclusion of charming voicemail from an old man named Richard. And like the impulse in the face of the arcade claw machine in “Candy Crane,” from which Jenkins gets her album title, the only thing to do once you reach the end of Play Till You Win is to try it again.

REVIEW: Jess Williamson - Heart Song

Kelly Kirwan

Jess Williamson has the twang and hardened resolve of Southern-bred heartbreak. There’s a forlorn ache that swarms her ballads like sand swept up in the wind, and while the dust does settle, it still coats her world in a thin layer of grit. So even in those moments when her voice contorts with a palpable yearning, there’s a certain toughness to her we’d find among the canon of country greats—and her vulnerability never comes across as weakness. No, the wounds have healed, even if their scars will never fade entirely.

With roots in Austin, Texas (a haven for live music in it’s own right), Williamson has followed 2014's Native State with a seven-track LP called Heart Song. It’s a brooding, richly rustic album into which Williamson clearly seems to have poured herself, body and soul. This is a compilation that feels as if it demanded calloused fingers and weary nights, giving rise to a beautiful, emotionally-dense mosaic. Williamson is a mesmerizing storyteller, and her narratives dredge up relatable moments of your past you thought were long buried.

Her idiosyncratic vocals bloom and bend in surprising ways, and she’s honed in on the Western croon that rolls across wide expanses with a lonely reverberation. Her voice will stretch slightly off-key, reaching a piquant pitch that's simultaneously surprising and recognizable, like a birth mark over which we’ve traced our fingers for years—a spot of welcome inconsistency and familiarity.

On the album’s longest track, "Last Word," Williamson’s voice wanders between a whispering fragility and throaty, surefire sentiments. It’s a somewhat stripped-down instrumental number, with airy guitar and slow, drawn-out percussion that’s meant to emphasize the lyrics. “Well this image of you here at my door / Is something I have pictured / Many times before,” Williamson muses, following with, “Well I shouldn’t have to run to touch you / But I do.” It’s a slow-burning rumination paired with languid chords, finishing as we might expect—with Williamson asserting in a breathy murmur, “I will have the last word.”

Then there’s "Devil’s Girl," a relatively bare track that puts the negative space between notes and Williamson’s a cappella to good use. Her voice is slightly (and probably intentionally) shaky as the track presses onward, “The best men I know are in and out of hospitals / Fighting some devils … Maybe I am just the devil’s girl.” That last line is delivered in a low growl, a dangerous thought she tosses unapologetically into the ether. There’s something captivatingly sinister in this song, with Williamson facing the darker parts of her personality and world—and she does so fearlessly. She’s folksy and raw, and Heart Song is a refreshing mix of fresh and rough for us to revel in.

REVIEW: Whitney - Light Upon The Lake

Kelly Kirwan

I listen to Whitney and I think of vinyl—needle to disc, the hypnotic rotation—or a cassette clicking in a beat-up car radio, no air conditioning, a red line moving unilaterally across the stations. They're boldly reminiscent of 1970’s classic rock 'n’ roll, the feeling of “it’s all happening” that Cameron Crowe wrote about. Whitney began with two ex-bandmates, Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek, reuniting in the wake of Smith Westerns’ dissolution. It was Chicago, in the dead of winter, with (I’m assuming) a wicked wind chill and a single tape recorder to toy with—and so the two started writing.

Whitney was their respite, a pseudonym in the same vein as John Denver, initially serving as a barrier between the boys and vulnerability. Ehrlich and Kakacek had both been through breakups and come across a few dead-ends musically, and so Whitney was a shield for their catharsis. Until they realized, in the bluntest of phrases, that their shit was good, and it could be even better. So they took ownership. And now, Whitney is lush with new members and country-soul ditties, stitched together on their debut album, Light Upon the Lake.

As far as debuts go, this is a tour de force.

Whitney cuts deep. Their lyrics are charged with longing or a wistful reminiscing, as their melodies flutter between melancholy and trickling rays of hope. The band captures that beatnik-inspired feeling of being on the road, a continuous state displacement and optimism inspired by the open path ahead. The one track that'll hook you quick, and drudge up flashbacks to a fragmented (but not necessarily bitter) relationship is "Golden Days." Ehrlich's vocals are an alluring warble, “It can’t be real ’til I’m moving on … It’s a shame I can’t get it together now / It’s a shame we can’t get it together now.” The words hit hard over the beat, which feels both buoyant and forlorn, with horns making a cameo as it closes, punctuating a bittersweet goodbye. It's a song that, rumor has it, Kakacek and Ehrlich sent to their ex-girlfriends as a send-off and a peace offering (and no, I'm not choked up. Let's keep moving).

A follow-up track to mend your aching heart is "No Matter Where We Go," which is all twangy guitar loops and top-down, feet-on-the-dash-board bliss. “We’ll make a living darling, down on the road / 'Cause I got you holding on to see where it goes,” Ehrlich opens, and instantly you have an itch for a warm-weather road trip. It has this feel-good, wing-it attitude that’s irresistible—all of which can be said of Whitney as a whole. That roll-with-the-punches mentality doesn’t disregard personal pitfalls, but doesn’t fall prey to them either. Out via Secretly Canadian, Light Upon the Lake is a twist of soul, Americana, country, and rock to help us thaw after the long cold winter—both in a literal and proverbial sense.