Springtime Can Kill You

Jolie Holland’s first album was as simple and stark as an Appalachian field recording; her second genre-hopped from folk to swing to blues; and her third, <i>Springtime Can Kill You</i>, settles on a sort of ambient jazz, informed by country, rock, and Tin Pan Alley pop without sounding bound by any musical style or even any particular century. On first listen, <i>Springtime</i> sounds woozy and slack, a set of songs on strong prescription painkillers. Only later do the subdued arrangements come into focus, the rhythmic and lyric complexities emerge. Holland’s voice is a uniquely gorgeous instrument, but she wants to do more than sound pretty. Warbling dreamy figures around the pitch and the beat, she slides through all the possible vowels in a syllable before settling on one. The effect is part avant-garde, part outsider-art. Aiming for poetry rather than authenticity, she succeeds beautifully on tunes like the ebullient “Crush in the Ghetto,” “Stubborn Beast” with its hushed lap steel and impassioned country vocal, and the very lovely “Mexican Blue”: “There’s a mockingbird behind my house / Who is a magician of the highest degree / And I swear I heard him rip the world apart / And sew it back again with his fiery melody.” Holland bills this as a 12-song cycle, but with her lyrics drawled, swallowed, and swirled, it’s hard to make out much more than smoky correspondences about love, dreams, moonshine, and birdsong. No matter: this is music to live inside, and the atmosphere is all of a piece.