Album Review: Here With Me by Jennifer O'Connor

Honest, literate, and straightforward, Here with Me continues Jennifer O'Connor's streak of mining the fertile ground between folk-pop and indie rock. She unearths twelve nuggets this time, from the intimate, fingerplucked "End of the Hall" to "Always In Your Mind," an immediately accessible pop/rock tune featuring harmonica, guitar arpeggios, and piano chords. O'Connor is a wiz kid with simple ingredients; she focuses on the hook and adorns it with basic instruments, adding acoustic guitars and la la la vocals to help highlight her melodies.

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There are two major observations to make regarding Jennifer O’Connor’s Here With Me, her second album for Matador and fourth overall. First, these songs of desire, loss and memory have an undeniable emotional depth. Second, O’Connor’s voice is languidly plain; it never seems to rise above a throaty flatness. She has a kind of blank disaffectedness that would almost be punk if it weren’t exactly the opposite of punk: i.e., intimate, easy and melodically accessible.

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