"Jesca Hoop counts early early folk songs, pop radio, chamber music, gospel music, 20’s to 40’s jazz, ol’ country, ol’ blues, slave songs, dance hall, murder ballads, rock and roll, blue grass and my backyard among her numerous musical influences to her debut album Kismet. Hoop is a striking, dark haired songwriter from Northern California who writes and sings twisty, sprawling, lyrically abstract songs featuring strange sonorities and offbeat rhythms. Jesca Hoop’s music is like a four sided coin. She is an old soul, like a black pearl, a good witch or red moon. Her music is like going swimming in a lake at night." --
Tom Waits.A sensual, esoteric singer/songwriter whose odd, sparse songs nod to influences like
Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Vashti Bunyan,
Jesca Hoop got her big break thanks to her gig as a nanny for
Tom Waits' offspring in the early 2000s. Hoop had grown up in a musically inclined Mormon family, but left the fold soon after her parents separated. She traveled around California, Wyoming, and Arizona writing songs and honing her craft before settling down with the Waits family for five years as their nanny. Waits took a liking to Hoop's off-beat indie pop songs -- songs that in their way linked her with so-called "New Weird Americans" like
Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and
Faun Fables -- and he passed her demo (a version of the song "Seed of Wonder") along to Lionel Conway, who in turn handed it to KCRW's Nic Harcourt. The DJ took a liking to Hoop's demo and started giving "Seed of Wonder" some airplay; the song went on to become fairly popular with Harcourt's listeners, so much so that record companies started paying court to Hoop. She signed with 3 Entertainment soon after the song hit the radio, and her debut full-length on that label,
Kismet, was released in 2007.
Santa Monica fell under Jesca Hoop's spell in autumn 2006, making her "Seed of Wonder" the most requested song in her local radio station's history. Hoop re-recorded it for her debut Kismet album, with assistance from Stewart Copeland, whose complex, ever-shifting rhythms enhance the number's uniqueness, sliding it toward hip-hop here, prodding it into a Native American dance there. Hoop is the master of such musical shifts and slides, and Kismet beautifully highlights her constantly altering perspectives. "Out the Back Door," for instance, swings dramatically from hip-hop to blues before leaping unexpectedly into drum'n'bass, while Hoop twirls her vocal styles in even more directions. The blues edge a clutch more tracks to wonderful effect, yet the singer is equally at home with folk, as she beautifully displays across the dreamy "Enemy" and the sublime "House in Heaven." The latter was lyrically inspired by a dramatic Chinese legend, and musically gives a twist of the East to British folk before sweeping into a '40s-styled jazz revue. The elegant, sophisticated "Love and Love Again" takes that latter style to its logical conclusion with a glamorous Hollywood musical arrangement, as Hoop swells and deepens her vocals in homage to Judy Garland. "Love Is All We Have" is a bit less successful, the mostly acoustic backing haunting, but her lyrics seeming a bit trite when themed to the man-made catastrophe that followed Hurricane Katrina. Much better is "Money," which instantly evokes Liza Minnelli's classic but moves the scene and theme from a Berlin café to the L.A. music industry, albeit musically via a South American tango club. "Summertime," a harmony and harmonics-drenched piece of confectionery, is lovely, but one of the least interesting songs on this enchanting and challenging album. It is, of course, the label's pick for first single. There are so many more fascinating songs within that it almost pales in comparison, for this is a set to leave one breathless with wonder. --
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:fnfqxzegldhe
