Jesca Hoop – Stonechild
Memphis Industries – 5 July 2019
Although, for recent albums, she has trekked back to California to record, this time around the Manchester-based Jesca Hoop put the air miles on hold and headed to Bristol to work with PJ Harvey producer John Parish. As such, his minimal approach has brought a more spooked, bare-bones sound as well as introducing other voices to the mix, notably female duo Lucius and Kate Staples of This is the Kit.
The album title comes from an exhibit in Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum of an unborn foetus a woman carried for over 30 years, a hard ball of bones she used as a metaphor for, as she puts it “carrying something for a long time, perhaps in secret and then giving it up.”
She opens with the spare, clanging, almost tribal rhythms of the desert-dry fingerpicked Free of the Falling as, featuring Lucious, she sings “We go look for dark to get rid of the feeling”, her soft vocals imparting an ominous feel to its religious references and lines like “I woke the wet moon.” Again featuring Lucius on backing vocals, initially set to a spare acoustic guitar and synth wash that gradually builds to a soaring peak midway, Shoulder Charge talks of togetherness and opening up rather than heading out “to meet a friend armoured in mascara” as she reminds that “empathy’s contagious”.
Hitting the high notes and accompanied by equally icy piano notes, she tackles the maternal perpetuation of a male-centric world with Old Fear of Father as, feminism be damned, the female narrator confesses “I love my boys, more than I love my girl, try not to show it, she’s knows, like I knew” and cautions “I shape and mould you so can get the ring while you’re still pretty.”
This sense of fatalism would seem to seep over into the intricate fingerpicking of Foot Fall To The Path in lines like “when you say hello I hear goodbye” and “why love if loving never lasts”, but the song with its hammered dulcimer and gathering tribal rhythm drone reveals itself as a sort of chant to the daily arcs of the sun and moon, a theme of repetition, change and permanence at the same time. But if you want a reminder that life and relationships can be shit and leave you adrift, then look no further than 01 Tear, a song of life wisdom as the oracle tells the narrator, “I can’t show you a love that is fair or life that is bearable, so I’ll show you how to win solitaire.”
Hoop’s lyrics can be cryptic to say the least, Death Row with its barely there keyboards, handclaps and airy harmony little girl vocals a case in point where she seems to be speaking of a doomed relationship (“narrowly I escaped inevitable, utter and total ruin, though not left unscathed my name and face kept intact by benevolent cowardice.” And “throw the baby out with the bath, stones in a house of glass. Lean into the cracks and let the sky fall in”) but also comes with images of change in mention of chrysalis and metamorphosis. Indeed, it’s sometimes hard not to to get the impression of a precious high schooler whose poems were always praised by the teachers, partly because they were so hard to fathom (“my tryptophan teeth and comatose lips firmly patched round the teat of a comfort whore”) they were assumed to be profound so as to avoid seeming ignorant.
You need to take time to ponder over these songs, but, fortunately, she couches them in engaging, light folksy melodies that make the going easier even when she’s sticking it to white supremacy of the steady rolling chug of Red White and Black with its images of “the white rows like ribbons of lace bend and roll with the field like a flag that is wavng and the black rows that sew their own chain.”
It’s back to unsatisfactory relationships with the pizzicato guitar patterns of the floatingly waltzing All Time Low where “hope lives with darkness/He sleeps in her bed and darkness fills tables with desperate friends “ and “the light at the end is a white paper pinhole loosely pinned to the wall down the miles of darkened hall.”
The notion of always being on the outside looking in and being faced with impossible tasks (“bring me sand, take this sieve”) in an attempt to find advancement “only to find your fate’s predetermined” is carried over into the folksy Simon & Garfunkel-like Outside of Eden. A duet with Stables and Justis, it opens with playground chatter proceeds to address the notion of a virtual love app in an age of technology where you no longer gather behind the bike sheds for a furtive snug and fumble but, as they sing “Come shut in boys for the girlfriend experience, enter the code and I’ll taste real” and of Adeline “going round the school yard from device to device/A feral education to give her what she likes.”
The album title finally surfaces on Passages End, another song of connection (“you and I are bound by a secret and the weight of a lie”) and loss (“my love became hard coil of bone… opening my legs to the deepest of oceans, now where I bury my stonechild”) with the overtones of being cursed or punished for transgression. It ends with the rippled bassline and keys of the fecund pastoral lullaby air of Time Capsule returning to notions of impermanence and transitions (“the moment you reach out to take hold of beauty is the moment that she turns to go”) but also of not being trapped by the past (“the time capsule we buried in the yard is brittle rust … the dead letters buried there soon found a light in me, held power over me, I found a way to get free”).
Whether you just want to drift away in the soothing vocals and musical ambience or dig into her lyrical concerns, the album offers many rewards and, while it may confront death, it also embraces life, a reminder that, as she sings, “You’ll learn to laugh once you’ve finished crying.”