Pitchfork

"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.