NEW YORK folkie Cassandra Jenkins has stepped away from the world of self-releasing on her own Cassandra Complex imprint to ink her signature for Brooklyn’s Ba Da Bing, which imprint – sometime home to Damon & Naomi and Comets On Fire, among others – hosts her second album, the detached, observational beauty of An Overview On Phenomenal Nature, out on February 19th.
An Overview … features a multiplicity of narrative voices gathered in from Cassandra’s haunts around the Big Apple – fishermen, birthday party psychics and spiritual driving instructors among them – all populating personal tales of pain, loss and the icier side of the emotional loss.
Cassandra says of that conceptual title: “Nothing ever really disappears, it just changes shape.”
“The goal is to be more fluid, to be more like the clouds shifting constantly.”
Laid down quickly – An Overview On Phenomenal Nature was finished in a week – Cassandra’s revealed a first track, the delicate, breathy “Michelangelo”: her voice a honeyed whisper dropping into fuzz guitar, as she sings: “I’m a three-legged dog, working with what I’ve got / And part of me will always be looking for what I lost.” It’s a classy slice of modern Americana which demands the (virtual) needle return to the beginning and again; at once light and melodic, with a thematic heft revealed in the listening.
Cassandra Jenkins’ An Overview On Phenomenal Nature will be released by Ba Da Bing on digital, CD and vinyl come February 19th; there’s a powder blue vinyl edition available to pre-order over at Cassandra’s Bandcamp page where, natch, you can also pick up back catalogue goodies too – that pressing is also available from Grapefruit, here; in the UK there’s also a strictly limited Dinked edition on soft pink vinyl with sticker set, &c, which you can plump for here.
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