Essie Jain

"The breathless refrain that begins the second section of "Talking"-- "Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up talking/ You gotta be kidding me"-- is the emotional culmination of Essie Jain's debut record We Made This Ourselves. Yet as a point at which tolerance reaches its limit and her frustrations boil over, the lyric itself sounds the opposite of angry. Not as much from indolence as much as attempted decorum, Jain thoroughly suffuses Made with the same sort of stately, delicate, and often somber understatement, the kind that casts the album as a possible first attempt to deal with with a number of enduring agitations.

Jain's thoroughgoing anti-dynamism emphasizes her distanced lyrical appraisals of situations that seem to be irrevocably broken, encapsulated by the evaluative tone of the album's title. While her plaintive voice suggests a chilly resignation, however, her words offer hope for reconciliation and repair. On "Loaded", she confronts a lover failing a battle with the bottle, and "Indefinable", "Give", and "No Mistake" all seek fresh starts for wounded relationships. The accompanying music is as minimal as the songs' single-word titles; typically, Jain accompanies herself only with piano or acoustic guitar. Other instrumentation comes and goes as necessary-- stand-up bass, accordion, bowed strings, hushed drumming from indie session-veteran Jim White-- but is strategically implemented for utmost effect.

Made's best songs, however, are those that augment Jain's lyrics most evocatively. After the sparse gospel opener "Glory", "Haze" promises a more exotic future. A vaguely political lament at less-than-forthcoming leadership, "Haze" is fittingly complemented by the French horns that gently appear in the song's last third, which take the song to a swirling conclusion that feels like a call-to-arms. On "Sailor", Jain's tendency toward overdubbing her own voice translates well to violin, and what starts as a lone wail progressively expands and multiplies, performing in concert with her most fervent and gorgeous vocal performance.

Most evident on "Sailor", but present in various incarnations throughout Made on the whole, is Jain's clear debt to British folk legend Sandy Denny, a singer most noted for her contributions to the earliest incarnation of Fairport Convention, along with her role as Robert Plant's counterpart on the psych-Celtic Led Zeppelin song "The Battle of Evermore." Jain's baroque approach to chamber-folk music is a fitting update of Denny's, and also serves as an appropriate counterpart to her Ba Da Bing labelmate, Beirut's Zach Condon. Both Jain and Condon are youthful musical prodigies interested in taking anachronistic Anglo-ethnic musics and presenting them through a modern lens. Although not as preternaturally cosmopolitan as Gulag Orkestar (nor does it necessarily strive for that distinction), We Made This Ourselves is an early piece of convincing evidence that Jain is capable of a similarly sophisticated blend of timeless and contemporary. - PITCHFORK

Ahh, the Sunset . . . the lights are red and there are corners to sit in, and this evening, there will be a chanteuse sort of a lady singing. For yes, Essie Jain has a piano-and-evening-gown kind of voice. Peggy Lee jumps to mind, as does Sibylle Baire, and her label compares her to Nick Drake and Low. These last two fit since she’s got a backdrop of minimal guitar and piano. But still, who I think of most with Jain is Julie Andrews. Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins singing “Feed the Birds.” Remember that scene? It was a long, sleepy montage; there was an old lady on some church steps and watercolor backdrops of London. - SEATTLE WEEKLY

For all the good the freak-folk contingent has done—from resuscitating the careers of forgotten pioneers to reclaiming the Birkenstock from Phish fans—it’s a shame that Devendra Banhart and his buddies have taught indie kids to greet simplicity with suspicion. These days, people assume that a singer accompanying herself on acoustic guitar must’ve given the African-percussion team the night off.

On her enchanting debut, NYC-based English transplant Essie Jain makes a compelling argument for the merits of minimalism. Most of the tunes on We Made This Ourselves are built around nothing more than guitar or piano; occasionally, drummer Jim White of Dirty Three supplies a whisper of groove, while “Haze” sports a lovely splash of muted Bryter Layter brass. Even the song titles, such as “Glory,” “Sailor” and “Talking,” eschew decoration.
Yet the music hardly feels unfinished, thanks to Jain’s voice, a richly nuanced instrument that packs far more emotion than your average freak-folk warble. Jain’s best trick is establishing a precise melodic line, then bending it with unexpected blue notes; in those instances, the story the music tells is of a woman straining against decorum to express herself honestly. That might be a smaller narrative than Banhart’s flower-child revolt, but in Jain’s hands it’s no less gripping. — Mikael Wood - TIME OUT NY

A British singer and songwriter who lives in NYC, Ms. Jain builds stark miniatures out of a few light strums of guitar and her haunting alto. On her captivating new album, "We Made This Ourselves" (Ba Da Bing) her voice is multitracked in precise harmonies that can be warm or ghostly. - NEW YORK TIMES

Essie Jain will make you shiver. No one is immune to what this New York-by-way-of-London-England young lady will do to the skin and the bones. She will make you clutch for your collar or hood to pull it in tighter around your exposed or unexposed surface. It doesn’t matter. Inside or outside, warm or cold, wind or none, Jain will send a bullet of a ripple through all of your layers and the haunting will commence, rattling all that’s moveable and reachable. Jain’s measured and immaculate voice pours over you and dries slowly like melting candle wax, which you can break out of, but it feels better to just wear that windbreaker of a plastic coat. She insulates you and could make a racing heart come to a screeching halt, calming it down with ladles of coos and a starkness that still spreads its wings out to give an impressive picture of vast, vast space. Her first full-length record We Made This Ourselves gives that haunting or any haunting a good name, as it has a general feeling of being way too close to you – reading your thoughts, knowing your untold secrets, kissing you on the mouth, combing through your hair, putting its hand upon your knee and staring, just fucking staring at you with that look. But it’s not bad that it does all of these things. It’s never intimidating. It’s as if an immediate trust was formed between Jain and yourself – somewhere in another time period where she feels comfortable talking to you the way she does and you feel all the same listening to these personal-sounding issues. (There’s nothing more unsettling than having someone spill their guts and hearts to you when you’re not expecting it or will to make the investment.) She’s going to sing about things you never knew you were thinking and she’s going to do it with a pristine sense of less is more that lands you hook, line and sinker, pulling you from the waters and into the boat just so a good look attcha can be had. She turns us inward as she turns herself inward and inside out to make a startling piece of art that could be placed in a meadow, set to play and in a short amount of time, forest critters would be gathered around it, sitting Indian style and just reflecting themselves on the emoting going on, able in some instinctual way to connect with the vibrations. If you look quickly, the moose and the Kodiak bear were both brushing tears away from their furry cheeks, affected as they were by the unshakable sincerity. - DAYTROTTER