Anti
2003
Catalpa
About This Album
Most know Jolie Holland as a member of Vancouver's the Be Good Tanyas. Catalpa is her first album, but it wasn't recorded as such. It had been a demo recording passed around to fans until Neume reviewed it on the internet. The venerable upstart label Anti has given it the proper release it deserves. Holland is a native Texan, and it shows in her songwriting. Her images are rich, though stark and Gothic; they sound transposed. While her worldview is mostly modern, its articulation is rooted in a mythical, metonymic America that ceased to exist long before Greil Marcus ever thought about writing Invisible Republic. Catalpa is a place of scribbles and ciphers. Holland's songs are etched out of encounters and experiences that are mercurial, fleeting. As evidenced by "Alley Flowers," a love song, the present and the past intermingle, where street corners and figures like Jesus and Zora Neale Hurston are evoked as relational archetypes, effortlessly. An acoustic guitar played repetitively is colored by bells in the same way Mickey Newbury used rain, as a device to remember and to intimately tell the object that this story is whole, complete, and utterly true in this moment. A pulsing tom tom hangs the tune in the hallmark of memory, haunted, hunted, rooted in the moment, though that moment may have come and gone decades ago.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,8,9 and 10)

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