There is a certain kind of Northern European songcraft that's difficult for we genre-crazed music journo sorts to categorise. The active components are a musical stew of late-night cabaret blues, oddball jazz-classical instrumentation, a smidgeon of Jacques Brel flavour, surreal lyricism and a quavering soprano female voice. At the forefront of this most miniscule of micro-genres would be Lonely Drifter Karen and Clare and the Reasons (although the latter hails from New York). Whatever we might call it, it's the polar opposite of rock'n'roll, it's often beautiful, and we can now add Jessica Sligter - AKA JÆ - to the list of its A-grade practitioners.
Sligter, who appropriately hails from Utrecht but is based in Oslo, was conservatory-trained but her music is a fanciful kind of gentle, burlesque chamber pop. She mustered a team of elegantly effective backing musicians by standing outside the Norwegian Academy of Music and asking anyone who came out through the gates if they were studying jazz. It was clearly an effective recruiting process - everything from the harmonium to the singing saw is attacked with whimsical glee, and quietly effective string arrangements come courtesy of the composer Ole Henrik Moe (did she doorstep him too?).
It's a shuffling, late-night, wintry sort of music, melancholic where it fancies, often just based around a piano or gentle strumming. "See all them breasts and tummies/ Maybe one day I'll have some like those/ Now I'm still doomed to oblivion", run the typically curious opening lines to "Jim's Place" against a backdrop of crudely strummed ukulele. Before long, however, the song has bloomed into strident choral pop of an almost ecclesiastical bent. It's delicious and unexpected, like much else on this sweetly offbeat treat of an album.
Find Balls and Kittens, Draught and Strangling Rain (HUBRO) on Amazon
