★★★★★
Jesca Hoop's 'Hunting My Dress' is not the most obvious candidate for a stripped-down remake: the 2009 album achieved cult fame at best and was hardly an overproduced mess. Yet here's 'Undress', an album of "live and intimate" recordings of songs from Hoop's second album. It's no radical reinvention, sure, but the singer captures these songs in their most up-close-and-personal state, with instrumentation stripped back to nearly zero - a guitar here, a clap there - and Hoop's rich voice like a...
- www.nme.com
2014-03-24
★★★★★
The 'issue' with this record is clear from the off; isn't an original effort, - it's a stripped-back, largely acoustic take on the tracks from 's second LP, . You're bound to form an immediate opinion, of course, as to whether it's an ambitious reworking or a lazy do-over. There's evidence to suggest that the album was a bit of a labour of love, with funding coming via Pledge Music...
- www.drownedinsound.com
2014-03-20
★★★★★
Too often is the word 'art' wielded when assessing the merits of pop music. A great deal of that which graces reviews pages is simply a matter of mechanics and mathematics, influences coming together in carefully arranged equations to produce a palatable result. This is probably still a creative act and often yields magnificence, but to brand the ubiquitous white noise that makes up the new releases merry-go-round as art is inaccurate, especially compared to music like Jesca Hoop's...
- thequietus.com
2012-07-26
★★★★★
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Jesca Hoop's back story - a Mormon upbringing, a period sleeping out in the wilderness, a job nannying Tom Waits's kids - is how little eccentricity it seems to have conferred on her music. Her third album has plenty of likable qualities: mild lyrical quirkiness (making doe eyes at Banksy), moderate eclecticism (dabbling in 70s MOR and breathy electropop), and an unerring knack for hummable melodies...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-06-28
★★★★★
For a while, it was quite easy to know a lot about Jesca Hoop without knowing any of her music - coming to our attention via Guy Garvey's fervent praise, the Californian arrived on British shores from the unlikely previous position as nanny to Tom Waits' children...
- drownedinsound.com
2012-06-25
★★★★★
When Jesca Hoop drew attention with 2009's Hunting My Dress, much was made of a history including time spent living "off the grid" and working as Tom Waits' nanny. Lively as the CV was, though, Hoop's songs and voice proved equally singular, her stark elegies, surreal dream-folk, skronky blues-pop and murder ballads landing on-target no matter how freely the California-born, Manchester-based singer-songwriter ranged...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2012-06-25
★★★★★
Jesca Hoop's last album, Hunting My Dress - her first since she'd upped sticks from LA to sunny Manchester - created quite a storm even before anyone had heard it. With high profile fans shouting her praises it was eagerly anticipated, so when review copies hit desks and the reviews lived up to the hype, she must've breathed a huge sigh of relief...
- www.musicomh.com
2012-06-11
★★★★★
A charmed and chaotic path led Jesca Hoop to her current home of Manchester, England. Born in California to a Mormon family with trad-folk roots, she worked as a homesteader in Wyoming and with a rehab project for youngsters in Arizona before becoming nanny to the children of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan - and beginning to receive recognition for her music on Nic Harcourt's KCRW radio show...
- drownedinsound.com
2011-04-11
★★★★★
Jesca Hoop's always possessed a bewitching murmur of a voice, but on 'Snowglobe' she drapes it unevenly over a sparse canvas with an awkwardness that never quite reveals itself. Lingering guitar, embellished sparingly, meanders of its own accord away from her vocal melodies, with percussion only breaking through briefly on the title track...
- nme.com
2011-04-04