★★★★★
It's 2 a.m. on a weekday night in a local club. Only the lonely and diehard drinkers are left, nursing their cocktails in a mist of stale smoke and cheap perfume. A woman and her combo shuffle on stage. The baritone sax lays down a gritty "Harlem Nocturne" groove as the group slides into a dark, hazy, lumbering rockabilly/country vibe that mirrors the surroundings and mood of the assembled stragglers...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2013-04-25
★★★★★
Firstly, this disc is blessed with an evocative title, and its song of the same name delivers the sounds to match. Where do we place , this country miss who also sounds like a darkly mysterious rock'n'roller, a blues-gal, a purveyor of garage exotica? She appears to be quite naturally gravitating toward several scenes simultaneously, well-versed in the manners of each form. Jewell sings and plays acoustic guitar, also taking the occasional harmonica solo...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2013-04-23
★★★★★
According to the title song, on the day Eilen Jewell was born, a gypsy told her mother that Jewell would be the "Queen of the Minor Key". That's a honky-tonk queen a la Kitty Wells or perhaps Shel Silverstein's "Queen of the Silver Dollar" type of country bar room royalty. Jewell sings about her fate over a romping rockabilly beat that indicates this while she may be the "queen of melancholy", this ain't no sad song...
- www.popmatters.com
2011-06-27
★★★★★
There's an off-the-cuff manner to the opening songs of Eilen Jewell's Letters from Sinners & Strangers that makes the album easy to like. She builds "Rich Man's World" around bits and pieces of older folk songs, leaving the listener with the impression that she might have heard the song -- somewhere -- before. She follows with Eric Andersen's "Dusty Boxcar Walls," a song that likewise echoed Andersen's folk influences...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
Eilen Jewell's country-blues flavored folk on Boundary Country will remind listeners of many new, talented women singer-songwriters without ever seeming like a copy. Like Jolie Holland, she slurs her muffled vocals on a series of original songs and accomplishes the neat trick of evoking tradition. Like the Be Good Tanyas, Jewell relies on fairly eclectic arrangements, though she's more progressive in her marriage of electric and acoustic elements...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
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