Kill Rock Stars
2008
Madam Owl
About This Album
Jeff Hanson's third album on Kill Rock Stars, his first since 2005's self-titled outing, is a welcome return from an underheralded artist, even if it differs only negligibly from its predecessors. As always -- for better or worse -- the most immediately striking feature of Madam Owl, at least for Hanson newcomers, is his unearthly singing voice: ethereal, gossamer, and yes, undeniably feminine. It's not simply that Hanson's falsetto is high, it's also impossibly delicate; tender but confidently solid; poignant without a hint of strain, with a resigned sweetness that recalls a certain (male) late, great labelmate. That resemblance, the other habitually noted aspect of Hanson's work, also applies to his songwriting and stylistic approach (not to mention this album's Portland provenance.) Madam Owl does little to discourage the reductive but apt (and inevitable) "female Elliott Smith" tag, although, continuing further in the instrumentally fleshed-out vein of Jeff Hanson, it has as much in common with the ambitious, classicist pop of Figure 8 and XO as the sparse, deft acoustic picking of Smith's earlier work. On the other hand, Hanson's music has always been polite in a way that Smith's is not -- less emotionally urgent, less rough around the edges -- and here it sounds positively urbane, with elegant chamber arrangements that give the album an understated Baroque quality, while still leaving plenty of space for his voice and folky guitar work to take center stage.
Track List (try tracks 1,3,5 and 10)

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