From the first line on Jana Horn’s eponymous third album, “nothing prepares you for this, or is a cure,” the tone is set for a record that is enunciated as it is open. Akin to the desert landscape where it was recorded—Sonic Ranch, in west Texas—the work’s dry production and use of silence, ringing guitar and discordant flute, has a vitality calling back to early Cat Power/Moon Pix.
Recorded essentially as a trio with Adam Jones and Jade Guterman—how the New York-based band performs—this ten-song album has Horn’s spoken-sung, stark vocals in useful conflict with the melodic, earworm quality of Guterman’s bass, and Jones’ jazz and punk-influenced approach to drums. The flute and clarinet of Adelyn Strei diverges and coalesces, spirit-like (“Go on, move your body,” “Untitled (Cig)”), while pianist Miles Hewitt grounds, sometimes with a single note repeated, like a hammer on a nail (“All in bet”). This third iteration from Horn reveals the artist at perhaps her most distilled and resourceful, hitting on a feeling with a touch.
Jana said about the album: “This album comes mostly from my first year of living in New York. There’s some bleed over from leaving Charlottesville, where I’d been in a graduate program for writing. And then there’s “Go on, move your body,” written in the Optimism days, before it was reissued by No Quarter. I can see how the conditions of my life may have caused this song to resurface, but it wasn’t a conscious decision then. It just felt like it was time, or something. To be reiterated.
Moving to New York after graduation had felt almost too right, like an arranged marriage. I was pretty unhappy for a while. My life was still in Virginia, where my friends were, in Texas, where my mother was learning to live again after years of being passed from one hospital to the next, like a crime no one wanted to be responsible for. I drifted through the city in pajamas, at midday. I wasn’t the only one. I saw real people painting (with paintbrushes) murals advertising iPhones, finding it funny to hump barstools, looking everywhere for their stolen cars, as though they had only been hiding. There’s a city marshal who once had a car towed with a child inside.”
