Play Till You Win

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.