Localized Jen Korte & The Loss

Folk music is a genre where the sound is what an artist makes it, a kind of musical palette that allows for imaginative songwriters to layer interesting words over basic instrumental structure. However, for some songwriters, this open simplicity can be suffocating and narrow space in which to work, and such is the case with the first release from Jen Korte & The Loss.

The album starts out with spaghetti-western whistles and dusty tremolo guitar, sounding very much like the Kill Bill soundtrack, and launches into a rollicking indie-country tune, one part Action Packed Thrill Ride and one part Lifted-era Bright Eyes. But then Korte asks, “Where can we hide?”—over and over and over. With that, barely two minutes into the first track, the album’s central flaw reveals itself: It’s too long and too repetitive. Nearly every song seems to climax around the three-minute mark—but two, three, and sometimes four minutes remain.

The album also struggles with variety—namely, a lack of it. Out of  Korte’s 12 songs, a whopping eight of them are in 6/8 time, with the same slow tempo, all relatively sad-sounding. And then there’s her voice, gritty and raw; when Korte sings “If I could afford cigarettes / I’d smoke a pack a day,” it’s sounds like she’s been doing just that. It also sounds remarkably like she’s singing lines from her diary; at times this can be endearingly disarming, like when she croaks, “I can’t drink this shit anymore / I lie face up, palms out, on the floor.” But often the confessional lyrics—“I’ve been drinking too much of you lately / I’m tired of crying myself to sleep”—are just cringe-worthy.

Musically, however, the album is well executed. The last two minutes of “If I…” transform the song into an up-tempo, foot-tapping instrumental with reverb-drenched, distorted guitar that would sound at home on a Grizzly Bear record. But it’s the only moment on the album that exudes any energy, and even the elements that appear as cool little flourishes in the sad songs—like the mournful brass that slides into “Street Lights And Bar Fights”—become overused tricks. By the end of the album, Jen Korte & The Loss just aren’t interesting anymore. Grade: C