Essie Jain Reviewed On Pitchfork Today.

Better late than never review of Essie Jain's The Inbetween CD released in May of this year.
Essie Jain:
The Inbetween
[Ba Da Bing / Leaf; 2008]
Rating: 6.9
Original post

Looking back, Joan Baez's high, heady trills seem eerily indicative of the unspoken melancholy that plagued the late 1960s in America: Baez's songs, no matter how upbeat, are seeped in a vague and persistent longing for something better, something less devastating. British-born singer and songwriter Essie Jain doesn't sound much like Baez-- she's not a folk singer, exactly, and her voice is often deep and direct where Baez's is light and warbly-- but her second LP, The Inbetween, is heavy with the same odd, pervasive uneasiness. From the nervous, scuttling piano notes which open "Here We Go" through the fog-horn desolation of the extra-grim "I Remember It Just Like This", The Inbetween is quiet and desperate, a trembling testament to general disillusionment.

Jain's minimal compositions-- most tracks feature only vocals and piano or acoustic guitar-- are dark and distrustful ("There is not an innocent man around us who isn't under siege," she bellows in "Please") and tinged with an otherworldliness that earns her comparisons to freak-folkers past and present-- especially Vashti Bunyan, Sandy Denny, and White Magic's Mira Billotte. The cinematic bleakness of The Inbetween can be wearying, but it's also the record's central conceit; its atmospherics are at least as essential as its songs. Consequently, The Inbetween becomes the kind of record that leaves its listeners craving melodramatic context (walking despondently down a mysterious alley, fedora deflecting light rain, face obscured)-- anything more distinctive and tortured than just slouching over on a living room couch.

Jain had a track ("Why") included on the Slim Moon-curated The Sound the Hare Heard (alongside a slew of singer-songwriters, including Death Vessel, Sufjan Stevens, Thao Nguyen, Wooden Wand, and Laura Veirs), and her ghostly 2007 debut, We Made This Ourselves, placed her squarely within the new spook-folk paradigm. All of Jain's work is focused, mostly, on her lingering voice: It can be deep and prodding or high and vaporous, depending on the moment. "Do It", one of the richer tracks on the record (it includes piano, guitar, and drums), is also one of the strongest-- Jain's vocals, raw and uncorrected, nudge and jab. In "Here We Go", a steady piano melody and twittering drums back up Jain's playful, jazzy vocal line, one of the lightest included here-- "Oh, oh here we go," she grins.

The Inbetween is a remarkably wistful album, the kind that can be trying or cathartic, depending on when and how you listen, but Jain's voice is mostly stunning-- it's indicative of her precise time and place, and, accordingly, means something to all of us.

- Amanda Petrusich, November 6, 2008

Essie Jain Gets Heady With Hesse on Daytrotter.

Joining Jarvis Cocker and Ade Blackburn of Clinic, Essie Jain recites a passage from her favorite piece of literature on Daytrotter.com.

Essie Jain Reads The Opening Passages of Hermann Hesse's "Gertrude" Stream

Whatever the lovely Essie Jain is doing, you cannot help but to pull yourself closer and to listen as intensely as your body can possibly listen. Her songs resonate with ache and you are thusly brought to the water’s calm edge, like a thirsty fawn. Her music comes from as deeply within as it can and it qualifies as kissing. It qualifies as skinny-dipping. It qualifies as shivering and hovering. We Made This Ourselves is a masterpiece, pure and simple. Here, Jain reads from Hermann Hesse’s “Gertrude” and the close listen picks out the children playing on the playground outside her open apartment window. It’s so her. — Sean Moeller

Essis Jain Writeup On Daytrotter.com

Great review of Essie Jain's We Made This Ourselves along with a random top five from Essie herself posted on Daytrotter.com today.
Full online article

Essie Jain Gets Lasso'd
18 April 2007
Words by Sean Moeller

Essie Jain will make you shiver. No one is immune to what this New York-by-way-of-London-England young lady will do to the skin and the bones. She will make you clutch for your collar or hood to pull it in tighter around your exposed or unexposed surface. It doesn't matter. Inside or outside, warm or cold, wind or none, Jain will send a bullet of a ripple through all of your layers and the haunting will commence, rattling all that's moveable and reachable. Jain's measured and immaculate voice pours over you and dries slowly like melting candle wax, which you can break out of, but it feels better to just wear that windbreaker of a plastic coat. She insulates you and could make a racing heart come to a screeching halt, calming it down with ladles of coos and a starkness that still spreads its wings out to give an impressive picture of vast, vast space. Her first full-length record We Made This Ourselves gives that haunting or any haunting a good name, as it has a general feeling of being way too close to you – reading your thoughts, knowing your untold secrets, kissing you on the mouth, combing through your hair, putting its hand upon your knee and staring, just fucking staring at you with that look. But it's not bad that it does all of these things. It's never intimidating. It's as if an immediate trust was formed between Jain and yourself – somewhere in another time period where she feels comfortable talking to you the way she does and you feel all the same listening to these personal-sounding issues. (There's nothing more unsettling than having someone spill their guts and hearts to you when you're not expecting it or will to make the investment.) She's going to sing about things you never knew you were thinking and she's going to do it with a pristine sense of less is more that lands you hook, line and sinker, pulling you from the waters and into the boat just so a good look attcha can be had. She turns us inward as she turns herself inward and inside out to make a startling piece of art that could be placed in a meadow, set to play and in a short amount of time, forest critters would be gathered around it, sitting Indian style and just reflecting themselves on the emoting going on, able in some instinctual way to connect with the vibrations. If you look quickly, the moose and the Kodiak bear were both brushing tears away from their furry cheeks, affected as they were by the unshakable sincerity.

1. NO FIREARMS ALLOWED IN HOMETOWN FOODS
This was a sign posted on the doorway of a grocery store in Kansas. We
had stopped the van for a snack break on tour, and needless to say,
after seeing that, I wasn't at all excited about buying their local
apple juice.
2. SHOES FOR $8 AND CANDLESTICKS FOR 25 CENTS
I'm not sure I ever fully understood the concept of New York shopping
extortion until I bought the items above, for these prices, while
browsing out of town.
3. THE WONDER OF A MACROBIOTIC MEAL
I went to a restaurant in Austin that was supposedly going to nourish
my entire body in one shot. It turned out to be true, and I came out
of that place feeling like I had been injected with joy.
4. RANDOM DOGS AND CATS
I have met many nice ones recently.
5. SLEEPING
There are some weeks out of each year, where you just really enjoy
having a good nap. This week was one of them.


Guerilla street video for 'Glory'

Essie Jain Short Film

ASAP video reporter Ray Zablocki documented Essie Jain's first trip to Austin for the South by Southwest music festival. The three+ minute film gives a before and after glimpse of her March 16th showcase performance.

VIDEO - Essie Jane goes to SXSW

Essie is currently touring her way back to New York.
03/21 Lawrence, KS @ KJHK (on air Performance 2 PM)
03/21 Manhattan, KS @ The Dusty Bookshelf
03/22 Omaha, NE @ O'Leavers Pub
03/23 Saint Paul, MN @ ON AIR: MPR 89.3FM (on air performance 1 PM)
03/23 Minneapolis, MN @ The Alamo House
03/24 Minneapolis, MN @ The Triple Rock
03/28 St Cloud, MN @ KVSC 88.1FM (on air performance 4:30 PM)