With her eighth studio album Haunted Mountain, Jolie Holland reasserts her stature as one of the most electrifying performers on the contemporary scene. A deep collaboration with Buck Meek of Big Thief, who released his own album tiled Haunted Mountain in August, Holland’s set infuses an exploratory singer-songwriter framework with elements of folk roots and aspects of experimentation. A natural defier of genre boundaries, Holland grapples with serious, difficult subjects across the record to gripping effect. It’s out now on vinyl, compact disc, and streaming through Cinquefoil Records.
Jolie Holland is still occasionally lumped into the Americana category, but her latest reaffirms my belief that her music is much too tough and frequently troubling for that designation. And as detailed above, her work has become increasingly difficult to stylistically pin down. An emotionally resonant singer who has earned comparisons to Norah Jones alongside subtle similarities to Karen Dalton, Holland is also a talented guitarist. The music never takes a back seat to the singing in her work, as Haunted Mountain is at moments reminiscent of Vic Chesnutt, especially in album opener “2000 Miles,” and M. Ward.
There’s a fantastic unfurling of gnarled electric guitar at the end of “2000 Miles” that gives an extra kick to the already potent dark folky atmosphere. And then “Feet on the Ground” sharply veers away from a folk template, its musical foundation featuring a drum machine run through an amplifier, strangled surges of electric guitar and looped sounds. The effect hovers around the outskirts of post-rock, though Holland’s by now easily recognizable drawl lends cohesion. Lyrically, she confronts the horrors of exploitative political systems, directly yet poetically.
Featuring hard strumming, alternately droning and soaring fiddle, unfussy drumming and intermittent cascades of electric piano, “Highway 72” is a duet with Buck Meek that details the period in Holland’s life when she was homeless. The song’s power is inescapable as the hard reality is eased somewhat by the artist’s perseverance.
“Won’t Find Me,” with its chiming string picking, is Haunted Mountain’s prettiest moment, and it’s here that her singing reminds me a bit of M. Ward. But Holland has honed a signature sound where comparisons of style are essentially fleeting. “One of You” is where her jazzy abilities really shine through, though the ambience is much closer to an impromptu recital in the back room of a rural house at midnight than a performance in a two-drink minimum nightclub.
It’s the title track, with its unwavering backbeat and layered strains of electricity, that cozies up the closest to country-rock in a post-Crazy Horse mode, a lovely statement and album highlight. But “Me and My Dream” also works up a substantial head of rock steam ahead of the striking redirect that is the atmospherically jazzy “Orange Blossoms,” with its foreboding and acerbic imagery further amplifying that Haunted Mountain stems from a profound displeasure at the state of the world.
In “What It’s Worth,” Holland saves one of her strongest vocal showings on the album for last as the accompanying music is an extended beauty move culminating in whistling and what sounds like the hiss of summer lawns. Along with Meek, Adam Brisbin and Justin Veloso do an outstanding job assisting Holland in the realizing of her vision. Haunted Mountain is a discomfiting knockout from an artist of distinction.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
