Present, intense
Free-range singer-songwriter tries to untangle a complicated universe. By Victoria Segal.
Jesca Hoop Memories Are Now
SUB POP. CD/DL/LP Former Mormon, nanny to Tom Waits’s children, a survival guide at a Wyoming camp for troubled adolescents, Mancunian transplant: Jesca Hoop has a CV that could be boiled down to “born under a wandering star”. 2009’s mercurial Hunting My Dress marked her out as a free-spirit, but with Memories Are Now, the Californian singer-songwriter makes all that perpetual motion properly moving, charting complicated emotional states with a clarity that sacrifices none of her idiosyncrasy. With her fifth album’s restless, looping lope – her first release since 2016’s collaboration with Iron And Wine’s Sam Beam, Love Letter For Fire – Hoop covers a lot of ground. There’s Greek mythology, biblical imagery, internet-age anxiety. On The Coming, crossed on the forehead by The Velvet Underground’s Jesus, Christ resigns his role as the messiah, handing over his crown of thorns and asking the devil for a new title. Pegasi uses a winged horse as a metaphor for love and control (“I suffered the bit and took his spur into my side… I shook that bridle free/And my beloved rider fell from the stars into the sea”). There are other ancient stories, then, underpinning this album: broken love affairs, ruined romances, untied bonds, and Hoop transforms the lone lovers’ script into one of righteous anger. “Go find some other life to ruin/Let me show you the door,” she sings fiercely on the steam-punkish hiss and clank of Memories Are Now, while The Lost Sky’s cloud-cover parts to reveal a glittering reproach: “Why would you say those words to me if you could not follow through?/Go wash your mouth out.” Trust – in one’s own perceptions, of others – is important, and Hoop often sings like somebody relearning the geography of her world, remapping what’s true and false. “Searching for your signal/Receiving mine,” she sings through the universe-scanning crackle of The Lost Sky (somewhere, a dog actually does bark), while Cut Connection, a distorted glam stomp, yearns to hear nothing but “the drummer in my heart”. Hoop’s songs reflect a world where the internal filters are clogged and the emotional sonar is jammed, and it’s not just people to
blame. Animal Kingdom Chaotic, built around the percussive clack of a typewriter and the unfortunate cooing refrain “computer says no”, worries over loss of autonomy, while Simon Says is a lullaby – or possibly lament – for a “pixelated generation”. All this environmental static means the music often seems to lurch and sway. The title track occasionally slows to a doo-wop blur, while Songs Of Old’s churchy simplicity gradually feels stretched out of time. Hoop has been a free spirit, but with Memories Are Now, she understands exactly when to use the bridle and bit on these wild, wise songs.