Calgary singer-songwriter delivers ten vignettes that explore the intertwining of desire and despair on this excellent debut album.
Jolene Marie is not an artist comfortable in the spotlight. With a generally private and reserved persona, she openly admits to not liking people looking at her, one of the reasons that led to her not performing her music on stage until she was in her late twenties. However, the release of her five-track EP Honey in 2023 revealed a singer-songwriter of immense promise, creating a steady groundswell of interest amongst both critics and the americana music community. Now, having teamed up with producer Brock Geiger, Marie has released Sun Creek, her debut album written over four months of diligent songcraft.
The opening track Two Hands Together quickly sets the musical landscape, minimalistic and intimate, with subtle splashes of colour that seamlessly act as the perfect conduit for Marie’s narratives, gentle and yet unflinching in equal measure, with a spiritual ambience that evokes Emmylou Harris during her Wrecking Ball period. Each arrangement is built around a guitar-vocal structure, where the unabashed poetry, such as on the tracks Lover and Aspen, draws muted comparison to Leonard Cohen, but with more delicate intimacy and less sexual tension. Elsewhere, Peach Smoke delivers a level of apprehension against a narrative that distils the inception of a perennial love through a scattering of innermost details, while some delightful pedal steel from Wayne Garrett helps both Lullaby and Dreaming to lean a little closer to a country vibe.
What underpins all the songs on this album is Marie’s vocals. Graceful and yet at the same time unyielding, gliding almost ethereally between desire and despair as it traverses from the depths of loneliness to the heights of revelation and rebirth, delivered with the effortless ease of one who fully understands the concept of less is more. As previously mentioned, there are moments when similarities between established artists can be drawn, as on the delightful Hazelnut, where a delicate, sultry approach draws comparisons to Lana Del Ray. At the same time, the lyrical stream of consciousness that creates a slightly sinister vibe for Mundane has a familiarity to Suzanne Vega’s early work. Closing number Song For Winter offers probably the most ambitious arrangement, with a subtle orchestration supplying the perfect conduit for the energetically strummed acoustic guitar on this transcendental ballad and its narrative that is as cathartic as it is direct, with lines such as, “Why are you trying to self-destruct? You’re all I believed in”, that collectively is reminiscent of the late great Nick Drake.
Despite the understandable need to draw comparisons for a relatively new artist, Marie actually cites the German folksinger Sibylle Baier as one of her main inspirations, and to be fair, there are clear similarities between the two artists, with Baier herself a reluctant performer who only ever released one album, the seminal Colour Green, which only saw the light of day over thirty years after it was recorded. For those not familiar with Baier’s album, Vashti Bunyan would be another, albeit tentative, touchstone, though in all honesty, Marie’s album neither requires nor encourages repeated comparison,
It can only be hoped that Jolene Marie proves to be more prolific than her hero, for on the evidence of her debut album, she is indeed already a singer-songwriter of the highest quality, and one would rightfully assume destined for a very bright future, with Sun Creek being one of the finest albums so far this year.
