Jana Hunter, There's No Home

reviewed by dave heaton

If Jana Hunter's second album There's No Home doesn't sound as eccentric as her first (Blank Unstaring Heirs of Doom), it's because it's a proper album: recorded in a studio with friends, instead of homemade 4-track recordings strung together into an album. The first impression – that the lack of rawness, of overt weirdness, means a lack of power – wears away soon, as you realize how well Hunter's songwriting talent is on display, how much more developed the song themselves are.

Hunter's playful, intimate art-folk songs remain idiosyncratic, with mostly one-word titles, unlikely declarations ("gypsies and babies / just the same"), and Hunter's raspy sooth-sayer's voice. But now they're within a still-minimalist, but somehow lush musical set-up that soothes like a warm bath, with omnipresent guitars and bass, but also piano and lap steel, and voices singing in harmony.

The album spaces out, focuses in, and meanders in a world of fables, philosophy, Texas blues, troubadour ramblings and, occasionally, surprisingly 'pop' melodies (or an old-time, M. Ward style of haunted 'pop', at least). It's a delightful journey overall, an album with a lot of mystery to it but also immediate charms.

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