Jolie Holland,
Springtime Can Kill You



Label: ANTI-

(5 out of 5)

Jolie Holland has pulled off the nigh impossible. She's followed her sparkling Escondida with Springtime Can Kill You, an albeit more challenging but even more brilliant CD, bound to visit misery on the one-off listener and ecstasy on those with the patience (masochism?) to return time and again.

Holland, a multi-instrumentalist and razor-sharp lyricist, has a voice at once gold-leaf-fragile and diamond-hard. And in addition to a musical palette encompassing jazz, folk, cabaret, country, trip-hop, and Salvation Army band retro, she has the now you see it, now you don't cinematic sensibility of Alfred Hitchcock.

In her world, beauty inhabits the mundane, ugliness, depression, and even death, and in this intimate treatise on love and the good, she celebrates detachment, defeat, and madness as normal, while arguing we must embrace without reserve both loneliness and nothingness. As the album's title suggests, springtime as rebirth — as the season of second chances — permeates almost every tune. Sure it can kill you, but not if you understand Holland's vision.

There are five standouts — and no weak links — among the dozen songs. "Crush in the Ghetto" (listen), a deceptively sprightly ode to love among poverty, finds beauty in weeds and ants, and nobility in a bus driver who looks like an African prince. The title track (listen) is so reminiscent — in a very, very good way — of Nick Drake at his short-lived best, it's bound to become a favorite of TV advertisers and movie makers. The countrified "Moonshiner" (listen) borrows from the enduring American folk tradition of "Candyman" songs that romanticize pushers of pleasures illegal, and thus turn the so-called-normal on its head. And the epically beautiful "Nothing Left To Do But Dream" (listen) finds perfection not in dreams, but in human company: I've got nowhere to go but to sleep / I would shut my eyes / but I've got promises to keep. But it's the closing track, "Mexican Blue" (listen), that sings home Holland's hopeful message: In the warm light of spring / You can find love like a Mexican blue / So bright and clear and pale in the afternoon.

With twelve songs packed similarly with naked lyrics, wrapped in stripped-to-the-bone arrangements, and delivered with microphone input levels apparently set to 11, Jolie Holland's Springtime Can Kill You will ease you through a central Texas summer and perhaps even a Minnesota winter.

Reviewed by Adam Black
May 9, 2006