- Pizza Time
If for some reason you love live music so much that you need to see more after the three-day Pitchfork festival, you’re in luck, because there’s still more to take in.
“Jolie Holland’s latest album, Wine Dark Sea, is the most aggressive, colorful, and dynamic batch of songs she’s made since her 2003 debut,” says Peter Margasak about the folksy singer-songwriter. “She fronts a resourceful band that gives her a rich, varied platform, and her voice is a stunner—pretty, precise, by turns breathy and guttural, and always assured. But as usual, her singing is also the element that makes it hardest to fully embrace her music. She augments the liquid phrasing of Billie Holiday with a thick twang, then drawls her words as though she’s got a mouthful of marbles. She manhandles her words like putty, elongating vowels, adding thick vibrato, and twisting syllables until parsing what she’s saying is almost like translating a foreign language. When she adapts the steady-rolling blues of Memphis Minnie on ‘Route 30’ (adding a nice touch of Piedmont-style songcraft), I can overlook her mannered delivery, but on the skeletal, atmospheric ‘I Thought It Was the Moon’ it’s a bit tougher.”
