On bluesy new tracks such as "Stubborn Beast" and "Moonshiner," she conjures a sensual, serious confidence that suggests she's ready to depose Cat Power as the queen of indie teardrop ballads.  Full text...

That exquisitely strange voice — part Billie Holiday, part tipsy gypsy in a Czech beer bar — becomes a garden of vinelike phrases and oozing vowels and birdlike whistles. And her band breathes along like a ventilator with brushed drums, pump organ, lap steel, and horns.  Full text...

Jolie Holland may or may not be familiar with you but one listen to Springtime Can Kill You will make sure you won’t ever forget her.  Full text...

"Springtime Can Kill You" is Holland's third official release and is a gorgeous collection of sleepy, downtrodden ballads that have a rather lonely, back bar on a dirt road in Texas feel to them.  Full text...

As always, Holland favors old-timey arrangements and melodies, taking cues from jazz, folk and blues, much like her previous album Escondida.   Full text...

The best tracks on Springtime are the ones that defy comparison and sound the most felt (and the least like four a.m. pass-it-around-the-campfire jams -- not to mention any names, um, "Moonshiner").   Full text...

Like Leon Redbone or Maria Muldaur, she effortlessly conjures up the moods and manners of an earlier time, her lazy, back-porch drawl sketching a folksy world of sweethearts and moonbeams, to which her instrumental armoury of harmonium, fiddle, piano, steel guitar and funereal brass band provide deft coloration.  Full text...

Her third album suffers in places from an attack of earnestness: it makes Nothing to Do But Dream, a spooky tale of fratricide, drag and closing track Mexican Blue sag under the weight of its own poetics. But when she takes up with moonshiners and starts crooning in alleyways, the whole thing bursts into lascivious life.  Full text...

Singer Jolie Holland has a mystery in her voice.   Full text...

Holland sings like a ’30s diva, breathlessly melding swing, jazz and folk, and pulling off the kind of trick that would be horribly winsome in the hands of, say, Katie Melua. Here it sounds as perfect as Pimms on Primrose Hill in May.  Full text...

Muddying the Waters: Retro-minded songwriter's latest suffers from vague ideas, blurry edges.  Full text...