Archaic Cannon

Jesca Hoop: The House That Jack Built - an Album Review

Listening to Jesca Hoop’s third album, The House That Jack Built, I feel very much the way I did when I first listened to Neko Case: “What took me so long?”

Raised in a religious Mormon family, Hoop left California to become a Wyoming homesteader in her teens, eventually wound up as a nanny for Tom Waits and today resides in Manchester. Her music comes across raw, honest and arresting, her voice yearning and insistent, sometimes hushed and never brash.

And yes, there are some similarities between Hoop and Case: The quality of their voices, the ocassionally twangy guitars, the musical arrangements that evoke wide-open Nebraska plains under stormy skies — they both make vivid music. Although Hoop’s songs aren’t quite as alt-country.

A number of the songs on The House That Jack Built are, however, very vulnerable, inspired by the recent passing of her father.

“It’s not enough to know you through them,” she sings on the title track, driven by a single, gently fingerpicked guitar, in a song telling a story of the aftermath, the going through a dead man’s home and hearing about him from the family members who were there.

Elsewhere, on “DNR” — for “do not resuscitate — she sings “Now we’re talking over who will take the dog, if he’s gonna make it through again ... And then my sister asked ‘Are we praying for him to pass?’ And no one dared speak out loud but we all knew.”

These are songs that are fragile and piercing in their honesty, and that I find myself listening to over and over. Not because I’ve had to deal with the loss of a parent, but because of the vulnerability she shows.

And while the album does have a pervadng sense of melancholy, there are brighter moments, such as the mid-album track “Ode to Banksy,” which is exactly what the title implies — a paean to the titular graffiti artist.

Jesca Hoop has released a fine album and will continue to be an artist to pay attention to.

JP