free music friday: spider

It’s been a while since we heard new music from Brooklyn’s Jane Herships, aka Spider. When her stunning debut The Way To Bitter Lake was first released back in 2006, Wears The Trousers was moved to proclaim her “classically beautiful, bittersweet voice” a rival to the likes of Julie Doiron and Nina Nastasia, while her subtly innovative songs were “devastatingly simple and suggestive”. ‘White Snake’, the first song to emerge from her forthcoming album, Things We Liked To Hold, is not a huge departure from those recordings. If anything, Herships sounds smaller, or at least more distant, more in thrall to her own melancholy, and owes absolutely nothing to David Coverdale and co. What the song lacks in clarity it makes up for with its sweet, heavy despondence. As with ‘Maggie’s Song For Alice’ on the debut, it’s when Herships revs up her electric guitar that the song really blushes with colour, infused with an ecstatically hopeful counterpoint to the lyrics. Not one for the Valentine’s mixtape, but a work of delicate beauty nonetheless.

FREE MP3: Spider, ‘White Snake’

BONUS MP3: Spider, ‘Air Mountain’
BONUS MP3: Spider, ‘Motion Pictures’ [Neil Young cover]

Written by: Alan Pedder

Tags: jane herships, spider

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 4:39 pm and is filed under All A/V, free music friday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.