Jolie Holland

Jolie Holland has always been a tweaker. The ramshackle sound on her homespun 2002 debut, Catalpa, was a delightful slap in the face to the slick-rootsy Norah Joneses of the day. On her third full-length, Holland has allowed her style to develop, without forgoing the shabbiness that made it refreshing in the first place. Starring her oddly charming, cuckoo-bird voice, Springtime Can Kill You is a set of gently rolling ballads that are at once soothing and unsettling.

Springtime has many of the hallmarks of the stereotypical country album—heartbreak, moonshine, spooky slide guitar—but Holland’s rural flair is pleasantly unrefined. In her exaggerated hick accent, she takes three or four syllables to get through a simple word such as “me,” and her pace deliberately never rises above a canter. She works out the pitfalls of romance to the dragging beats of waltzes (“Mehitabel’s Blues”), lullabies (“Crazy Dreams”) and down-tempo jazzers (the title track). On her own time, she twangs through phrases with assured clumsiness, often holding her vibrato a little too long over lazy baritone horns. Instead of indulging in spring fever, Holland condemns its kick; rather than celebrating the trite excitement of the season’s lust she indicts the unrest it brings: “And the springtime almost killed me,” she confesses on “Moonshiner,” “with the hot blood in my veins.”—Cristina Black