JANA HUNTER - THERE'S NO HOME

If our editor in chief would let us, we could easily do several Jana Hunter superfan stories a week. Here she is filling in on bass for the Castanets on their March swing through town; there she is nailing an R. Kelly penned Isley Brothers song; Oh look, over there we see her having the scientifically demonstrated most superior of all birthdates – and those are the things we didn’t write about. You can imagine, then, the Doublemint it is for us that we have something indisputably meritous to write about this evening, namely her new record.

The most striking reflection about There's No Home, almost from the get-go, is that it’s an ideal record for an afternoon on the beach (yes, we realize that some of the album was penned on a sailboat, but we’re saving our Two Years Before the Mast references for another time). This will be surprising to fans of her first LP, which we internalized as a soundtrack for such character forming moments as getting one’s son up before dawn and taking them sleepy eyed to the barn to witness the putting down of the sick old grey mare. But yeah, the beach, though it’s not necessarily California Girls and Beach Blanket Bingo that we’re talking about here.

There are sunburns, and patches where all that glitters is broken glass, and days with flies and rotted kelp and weeks where the morbid beauty of a flotilla of purple invertebrate carcasses will have to make up for the lack of bare midriffs. There is the lurchey stumble forward of footsteps in sinking sand, and the silver danger of the wading angler’s lure as her hooks arc toward you before the reel is cast seaward. Is that really a guitar tossing over and over, or is it a discarded plastic sack, trying to make its own way Home but sentenced forever to summersault and dance in the undercurrent only inches from the respite of packed sand?

Yet, for every moment that we have to remove our headphones to determine that the waves we are hearing are in the world around us and not on the record inside, we’ve got our shoes off and are holding hands and throwing sticks. Here, at that very same beach, we’re laughing and pedaling our cruisers so fast on the sidewalked outskirts that we can’t say absolutely if those circling Vultures aren’t just gulls caught up in the mischievous ocean gale we credit ourselves with making. And at times, we can stop flying our kite only long enough to join the entire collection of our best mates around the bonfire and kick a few rounds of ‘Bird’ up to the moon.

There's No Home is one of those records that fills an empty slot in your go-to list you may have not realized you had before. It plods, it gallops, it cries, it giggles, it hurts, it hopes – and it does it with the comfort of saltwater ebbing from your heels and returning again. That’s a good feeling, no matter how cold the water is. Recommended.

Jana Hunter’s There's No Home Release party is this Saturday night, March 31st at the Proletariat. Also on the bill is her band Jracula and local locals, Balaclavas.

MP3: Jana Hunter - Babies