Voices sometimes get to you. Something in the way they curve round the words. Maybe they remind you of something familiar. A feeling or a memory perhaps. On this 5 track EP by This Reporter, Jennifer Curtis's voice had that effect. She sounds familiar but not in the way that she sounds like something else. More like she echoes feelings that we have all felt.
There is a sense of melancholy to the proceedings that is reinforced by the production sound. Reverb swathes the sings in a swirling unreality. Emotions are there in quantity as well with the torment of repressed feelings surfacing in "Letter". The delicate piano introduction to "Set Me" seems to signify hope and indeed there is strength even majesty in the words.
Jennifer Curtis's songs might well be described as the kind of thing that would result should Fiona Apple and Janis Ian get together. Intense and emotional, they work away at you until you have to press the repeat button for another fix. Songs that are a hell of a lot bigger than they seem on first acquaintance, in other words.
Available from CD Baby.