Just for future reference: When you hear people at a party talking about Jennifer Gentle's new psychedelic avant-pop gem, you probably shouldn't embarrass yourself by dismissing said Jennifer as just another long-haired maiden of the freaky folk renaissance. No, Jennifer Gentle is not a woman, but a band of sweet-faced Italian psych-rompers whose jangly Sub Pop debut, Valende, was one of the best things about 2005. Wantonly cribbing from the 13th Floor Elevators and Syd Barrett's demented folk experimentation, Jennifer Gentle's newest, The Midnight Room, shudders with arrhythmic guitar plunkery and the giddy, sometimes rakishly annoying vocals of primary songwriter Marco Fasolo, who recorded most of this album alone in the foggy plains of Northern Italy. Its pert, sometimes carnivalesque instrumentation -- despite an unfortunate before-last track, whose atonal riffs are just shy of grating -- keeps the The Midnight Room buoyant as it meanders melancholically through its own brand of 50's rock-n-roll plundering. Don't catch the loving Nino Rota and Kurt Weill references? They're probably lost in translation -- but it's still a treat to uncover the fragments of sense and melody buried in this weird little egg of an album.
--Claire Evans
