Jana Horn

Jana Hornの3枚目のアルバムは、ニューヨークで作曲しテキサスの砂漠でレコーディングした作品。自身のトリオ(Jade Guterman - ベース / Adam Jones - ドラム)と共にSonic Ranchスタジオに赴き、10曲からなるセルフタイトル作を制作。過去にYo La TengoやPhil Elverumと比較されたこともありますが、"Love"や"All in bet"ではその傾向が色濃く表れ、"Designer"や"Don't Think"ではシンプルなポストパンク・リズムが楽曲を全面い押し進めます。。「Hornの作品は、ジャンルを超えた孤独のフラタニティと呼べるものと共鳴している。Young Marble Giants、Syd Barrett、Broadcastの影響が彼女の楽曲に漂っている。」The New Yorker。

Jana Horn introduced her brittle, fractured, intimate style of songwriting and recording in the second half of the 2010s before releasing her debut album, the sparse Optimism, in 2020. She made her label debut on No Quarter with the still meditative but more expansively arranged The Window Is a Dream three years later. She returns to a more minimal, profoundly apprehensive sound on her third album, tilted simply Jana Horn. It opens with a reworked version of one of her early songs, "Go on, move your body." Like a silence broken by putting pencil to paper, the songs lethargic bass guitar and barely registering bowed strings -- played as quietly as possible, resulting in random squeaks and wavering pitches -- accompany equally slight vocals, whose heartbroken lyrics include "Nothing prepares you for this/Or is a cure/No way" and "Nothing compares to a thing in memory/Nothing compares to a thing already done." Although most of the rest of the Jana Horn LP features arrangements that add drums, guitar, and the occasional piano, woodwind, or synthesizer, that song sets the tone for an album that may find one leaning in to listen and whose vocals sound weary and on the verge of tears. Horn completed an MFA in fiction around the time she released her previous album, and her X-ray-like observations and affecting turns of phrase are on full display here. Alongside a gloomy guitar chord progression and recessed rhythm section, the relatively uptempo "Love" notes that "Love doesnt fall/It is always there, like the moon in the middle of the day," and "Without" uses a skeletal orchestral jazz-rock to underscore lyrics like "If you believe yourself, I will try to" and "Everything is harder without." Wounded and graceful, both in its music and messaging, the writers eponymous album is one for headphones and private moments. ~ Marcy Donelson