Jen Olive – Warm Robot

Jen Olive is an excellent guitarist, and not just technically. She builds songs out of riffs – astutely tape-stitching them together until they ellipse, propel themselves forward, and end up resembling something musical.

In fact that sums up Olive’s songwriting quirk as a whole, her debut album Warm Robot never plants both feet on the ground, and instead capers around the listener with a deep bag of tricks. Rigid, Longstrech-ian vocal melodies, neo-classical brushes, lucid, polyrhythmic drums; it’s experimental pop the way Eno would imagine it – allowing the listeners to bop their heads and decipher the snare at the same time.

Warm Robot certainly does sound like a labor of love, nurtured into existence through countless takes and studio babysitting (even the album’s most basic track, the single-minded “Boulevard” is well-painted over in textures)  – and while that can go very wrong, Olive pulls it off. The tracks never sound produced to hell, in fact, despite the apparent crowdedness of the record, she keeps a certain level of minimalism to her work. The sounds her are sparse, aloof, existing in their own paradigm, cobbled together at the very end to make a song. Her voice splinters off in a dozen directions, only to be played back in perfect, mind-boggling harmony. Olive sounds like a world-worn experimental champion, which makes it even more impressive that this is only album number one.

http://www.myspace.com/jenolivemusic