'Hazel Eyes' is an invitation to get lost in the wide-eyed acreage of well-worn American song through the ages - intuitive loner folk, flapper blues, American spiritual roughage and acid folk are sewn into a lovely patchwork by one of America's most adventurous songstresses. Self-produced in the studio with an array of unusual instruments and eclectic arrangements, 'Hazel Eyes' is a fearless collection of 15 self-penned originals written over a five-year period. Josephine Foster's previous releases topped Best of 2004 lists in Chicago Reader, San Francisco Chronicle, Pitchforkmedia, Dusted, Stylus and Foxy Digitalis.
Review by Johnny Loftus
On Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You, Josephine Foster trades the rangy psych-folk of her 2004 album with the Supposed for the lonesome chill of an empty studio. She handles everything on Hazel Eyes, from layering her vibrating saw blade of a voice to accompanying it with kazoo, dulcimer, harp, homemade percussion, and, at the center, her dry and spindly acoustic guitar. Foster's singing often consists of a wordless, moody sigh. But she also fills the corners of her lilting, swaying songs with talk of bones, treasure, and hominy grits. Her antiquated enunciation can be little trying -- she's from Chicago, not Kisimul Castle. But the style works if you let yourself believe that Hazel Eyes is a crazy old 78 you found in an attic. (Its runic, earth mother cover art helps.) Alongside the album's more esoteric material -- including "Pruner's Pair" and the raga-like "Celebrant's Song" -- are pieces with an at least an element of easygoing fun, like the casual, old-timey flair of "Good News," or "Golden Wooden Tone," which with its kazoos, harmonies, and tumbling jacks percussion is downright gleeful. Gleeful like the final song of Puritan girls condemned for witchery, but gleeful nevertheless. For fans of Espers, Joanna Newsom, and Foster's own work in the comparatively less strange Born Heller.
Josephine Foster
Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You
[Locust; 2005]
Rating: 7.8
If folk took slugs and freakfolk-as-fuck was the cooked crackjective it should be, Foster would wear the kevlar, no question. Banhart has a beard-- hey, so does my dentist. So do most Catholic priests and nuns. Newsom has a crazy voice and wears colorful clothes. Whatever. All my buddies shop at Ecko, too. So does my dentist. So does my rabbi. All you kids with your fucked-up teeth and Martin backpackers, get your weight up-- you are not freakfolk-as-fuck. You are not freakfolk in the flesh.
Call it a guest spit-- though I'm done with all that, seriously, so let's just call it a spot-- Foster's solo spit on Golden Apples of the Sun made for one of that comp's most memorable outings. We wanted more solo Foster, but settled for the excellent Born Heller collabo with Jason Ajemian and the slightly less excellent rock-opera All The Leaves Are Gone LP Foster cut with her band the Supposed. Then this solo record dropped (!) last month and we finally find out how truly nuts this woman is. Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You is not a collection of whipper-snapped nature-isms with the occasional diminished chord hacking shit up. No, this record actually taps into some palpable loneliness-- a hopeless, almost Orphic worldview where song's both the symptom and the cure.
Lots of times I feel like Foster's career is an alternate ending to The Wizard of Oz-- instead of melting-melting we get exile music, "Throw away my food/ And find a dish of stone/ Perhaps I would be fuller/ If I started at the bone", and the wicked west's most sweetly terrifying croon, confident in its glissandos and rubatos, bolstered by tasteful overdubs and found percussion. Writing a flip on the Sirens called "The Siren's Admonition", Foster seems hyper-aware of her vocal affectations; to her immense credit, she doesn't merely execute but flips further. The Sirens would never admonish-- would never advise, "Careful of your secret love!"-- since they're sustained precisely on knee-jerk human impulse. This isn't lit-jocking though; the tension's in the voice, in the music, more visceral than learned. And that's a further conceit, since here we are, hanging on her every word not to hang on her every word.
So Foster's got this vaguely martyr-like songbird persona she's working, and sometimes the devious witch bit sticks out too, as on "Crackerjack Fool". The old "Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird" nursery rhyme's here set to black sway and flame, viciously puritan and blistery: "Shush little baby, you be cool!/ Or you're gonna grow into a crackerjack fool!/ Caw caw caw caw..." Foster's a spine-tingler who baits with images of the familiar inevitable, her voice a nightmare we want to have. She won't tell us things are gonna be better, and she won't give us counsel to make things so ourselves-- "There are reasons for our trials/ They are not our own". But whatever back-alley grove she's working, she's playing these songs all the time, and off-track visitors don't bother her.
-Nick Sylvester, May 24, 2005
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