What always chills my blood and ties my tongue is Hoop herself, no longer a spider but a monarch butterfly, louder and brighter and stronger than she’s even dared to sing before.
Memories Are Now is a gorgeously delivered elegy to heartbreak and loss; powerful, perfectly executed songs to bring comfort and strength to the weary, broken and scorned.
One of the most engagingly idiosyncratic and refreshingly broad collections of solo singer songwriting in recent memory.
At 39 minutes, there’s hardly a wasted moment on Memories Are Now. It's the rare folk record that never allows you to zone out or simply engage with it as a collection of lilting melodies and ornate instrumentals.
The album encompasses much of the range of her previous output, which routinely challenged the boundaries of indie rock and folk, encouraging a label more along the lines of unconventional singer/songwriter.
Memories Are Now brings the idiosyncratic nature of Hoop’s original artistic design to the forefront with as much grace and freneticism as she has always born.
For an album with a pretty bare sound – fingerpicked guitar, lots of reverb and space, rhythm tracks that amount to the odd bass drum thud and what sounds like someone banging a piece of wood against the floor – it’s teeming with ideas.
Memories Are Now is a giant leap forward for Jesca Hoop, betraying any lazy pigeonholing, and really cements her growing status as one of the true visionaries of the music world today.
Jesca Hoop’s fourth album Memories Are Now sounds like her most complete and refined statement yet, a boisterously declarative album that’s urgent and at times seditious.
While Jesca Hoop's latest album does lack a strong sense of identity, its well-crafted songs and beautifully simple instrumentation are more than enough to make it one of the better singer-songwriter releases 2017.
+ Precise
+ Charming voice
+ Cool lyrics
+ A little experimental ...
- ... But not enough deep to this direction ...
- ... And as a result, predictible at moments
Original Score: 83
EDIT: Memories Are Now continues to blow me away. Now even almost two years later, I still return to it pretty frequently, with each revisit revealing some other element I'd missed the past 60 listens before. The lyrics in particular, I finally feel like I've fully digested and can say that they're some of the best, if not the very best from 2017 to me. The weather's been perfect for Jesca, and I'm looking to dive into her other albums soon to see if she has any more hidden ... read more
1 | Memories Are Now 4:23 | |
2 | The Lost Sky 3:51 | |
3 | Animal Kingdom Chaotic 3:45 | |
4 | Simon Says 3:19 | |
5 | Cut Connection 5:15 | |
6 | Songs of Old 4:43 | |
7 | Unsaid 4:16 | |
8 | Pegasi 3:34 | |
9 | The Coming 5:56 |
#45 | / | Drowned in Sound |
#45 | / | Norman Records |