Alice Bierhorst

Alice Bierhorst wears multiple hats with confidence on her sixth release, "Earthbound". This native New Yorker spent years crafting her accompaniment and writing skills in the San Francisco music scene, before returning home in 1999. Back in New York, which seems to infiltrate her writing, she defines a new sound for herself by playing all of the brooding rhythm tracks on "Earthbound". The lyrics are lean and use metaphor to dig into everything from love to war. Her chameleon vocals change character with each distinctly crafted song bringing to mind the photography of Cindy Sherman. Tinges of Velvet Underground and Nick Drake can be heard, but Bierhorst's urban drumming and painterly lyrics are unique. These 10 tracks of beautifully weird pop remind us that less is more. - Performing Songwriter

Her voice is beautifully expressive, at times whispering...Restraint keeps these songs from going overboard, though it would be hard to imagine them performed any more succinctly. With lyrics about isolation, mental breakdown and death, Bierhorst conveys a world in turmoil as seen through an impassive observer's eye. The music itself borrows from jazz, blues, folk and rock idioms, and is constructed economically, with a waste-not, want-not philosophy, and little if any sweetening. - Amplifier

Bierhorst shows promise on this LP of spare but insistent, confident folk-pop. Her voice and some of the songs remind in good ways of Joni Mitchell. But unlike most girls with guitars who ply the Mitchell path, Bierhorst has an engaging voice not immeditely compromised by such comparison, and her more strident acoustic-bashes, such as the two-chord puzzler "At Sunset", shows she's got some real punk spunk in her as well. The production is particularly good, making her six-string ring brightly on the more pleasant tunes and giving it a more unforgiving harshness on the rockier numbers. Keep an eye on this one. - The Big Takeover

What's it like? It's like one of those albums you wish you had owned forever. Its simple, stripped down arrangements seduce you all the way in to the comfort of Alice's soft, lilting voice and devious hooks. This is an excellent work of art that certainly qualifies as a contender for a best of 2003 album. - www.esotericecho.com

A refugee from the San Francisco art and folk scenes, Bierhorst has relocated to New York for her latest album, "Oxygen", which finds her crafting smoky, supple, creep-folk, similar to and as indelible as David Crosby or Red House Painters. She's definitely a mature adult and a confident artist, and even the gothic traces that surround her songs are less depressing than they are classically beautiful. This is a record with atmosphere - Performing Songwriter

With her third album in three years, San Francisco songwriter Alice Bierhorst continues to create stirring music that revolves around the nucleus of her wondrous voice. Distant rhythms and slow sinewy electric guitars create the backdrop for her pensive meditations, which recall all the claustrophobia and intimacy of a classic David Lynch movie - BAM

While her last CD "Safe Places to Dream", had several pieces of pop brilliance, "Maker's Mark" is the more fully cohesive and realized work. "Dark Horse" is a tender shoegazer that transfixes the listener with its deep, mournful vocals, its sugar-ribboned harmonies on the chorus and its arresting, fuzzy-perfect guitar solo. "Angel" is a glistening love paean that melds her gift for inverted, unexpected melodies with her inclination for romantic-gooey sixties pop. The title track is a leisurely trip through the upper reaches of Bierhorst's imagination and ends on a lovely and trippy Abbey Roadesque high. - SF Frontlines

Whether she's the nice girl gone bad, pruriently playing her guitar with her mic stand; cooing about her idyllic childhood in Woodstock; or just warbling a heavenly tune, Bierhorst likes to project herself in stark relief. - Bay Guardian

Alternating between full-throated pop, quirky folk-rock and ethereal torch-songs, Bierhorst's chief weapon is an arresting and fragile gift for melody. Her best songs derive their power from the tension that exists between classic pop structure and a nonconformist sensibility. That, along with intrepid lyrics and intricate textures has her songs drifting into territories once charted by 1960's romantics like Brian Wilson, Joni Mitchell and the Roches.
- SF Frontlines

"Heaven" is a smart, wonderfully cranky record that represents the best of new school punk-folk instincts: an air of recklessness, a sexual frankness, a refreshing lack of modesty. Bierhorst manages to make the prototypical singer-songwriter ruminations about love, sex and gender-wrestling seem both revelatory and familiar – at times perhaps too familiar. - Option