Jesca Hoop was raised in a Mormon household in Northern California, where she grew up singing harmony with her siblings. Later, she worked as a nanny for Tom Waits' kids. Her songs have been heralded by KCRW's Nic Harcourt and Elbow's Guy Garvey, who took her on tour as an opening act. But recently she moved from California to Manchester, and it is this, perhaps the most mundane aspect of her biography, which turns out to be most crucial, at least in regard to her second album, Hunting My Dress. That transatlantic relocation deeply informs her music, which blends British pastoral folk with earthy American blues and roots traditions. Evoking both the sylvan glen and the swampy delta, Hoop sets lilting melodies against gritty guitar licks, which lope through the songs with dogged repetitions-- as if she's excerpted only a few minutes of an infinite loop. It's a bracing combination of styles, one that underscores the drama of her lyrics and emboldens her idiosyncrasies.
There's a disarming personality at work in these songs. How many other musicians would bother to write about hearing a DJ play one of her tunes off her debut? And how many could do so without sounding self-impressed? On "Angel Mom", Hoop compares that feeling of professional accomplishment to the joy of her mother coming home: "I haven't felt that way since I was a child," she sings with a measured nostalgia, her voice careening over the syllables softly. Her own past is fodder for these songs, but Dress never sounds beholden to rock history (and certainly not to Manchester's). Rather than simply revive these old British and American styles, Hoop plays around with them, deconstructing and reassembling them in odd ways. She half-raps the verses of "Four Dreams" in a child's sing-song melody, then breaks into the kind of carefree chorus Liz Phair has been trying to write for a decade. "Feast [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| of the Heart" dirties up her vocals to gritty, claustrophobic effect, but she sounds liveliest on the more straightforward songs, especially "Murder of Birds", a plaintively acoustic duet with Elbow's Guy Garvey.
Hoop constantly foregrounds her eccentricities on Hunting My Dress, and her plucky precocity can be alienating at times. She begins "Whispering Light" with a trill of vocal birdsong-- a strange freak-folk scat-singing that's a questionable introduction and a hurdle to overcome. Her songs veer purposefully into digressions, studiously avoiding verse-chorus-verse structures and twisting themselves into unexpected and not always graceful shapes. The esoteric quality of Hunting My Dress occasionally sounds willful, as if that free-spirited personality were itself a careful construct-- a particularly studious and insistent one. Hoop is an undeniably charismatic musician, but her music will benefit from a more natural and organic absorption of these impulses. In other words, she doesn't need to work so hard to prove anything.
