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 Caught in the Carousel "There will be music despite everything"
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Jen Gloeckner
Mouth of Mars
Spinning Head
There's more than a hint in Jen Gloeckner's music of the world falling apart. One gets the overpowering sense that Gloeckner's always signing through a storm of apocalyptica—roofs breaking apart in the wind, powerlines going weak in the knees and falling into cars and waves stretching above houses python-like, before striking them with a foamy wood-splintering force. As undesirable as that may sound as a physical place to be, from an emotional standpoint, it's exactly where Gloeckner is most comfortable. The Mississippi-based songwriter is at home in the chaos and in it she gleans a sparkling sense of order. A fiery mix of Marianne Faitfhul's moody foreboding and Tanya Donnelly's bittersweet poeticism, Gloeckner is a dark and difficult to predict talent. The cello-powered "Burn Me" starts as a sacrificial waltz but ends somewhere sinister and breathy; "Die" speedbags away as it rails against mortality, while "Pulse" finds her unapologetically declarative ("You can't change my mind/You can't change my pulse"). The mesmeric shuffle of "Trip" finds Gloeckner advising, "What a perfect time to drop your anchor," which, depending on how dark you like your narratives is either a great or terrible idea and the spacey forked-tongue "A Lullaby" is the kind of number that puts monsters in the closets of kids' minds. "There's no reason to be frightened," she sings on "Haunt You." Reassuring words, sure, but in Gloeckner's falling apart world there's every reason to be frightened. So if you're going to follow her, you'd better stay close...
—Alex Green
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