Album Review: Blood Rushing by Josephine Foster

After two recordings of Spanish folk songs with her partner Victor Herrero and his band, Josephine Foster returns to songwriting for Blood Rushing, her third offering for Fire Records. Recorded in Colorado with producer Andrija Tokic (Alabama Shakes), Foster’s band on the outing consists of Herrero and Foster (guitars); Paz Lenchantin (Indian flute, bass, and violin); Heather Trost (violin, Indian violin, and jaw harp), and Ben Trimble (skin drums). According to the artist, this recording is a ballet chante (sung ballet), a story within a story, about a heteronym she created for herself called "Blushing.

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In an interview, Josephine Foster said that someone once told her she sang like a theremin, and that’s not a bad description. Her vibrato comes from operatic voice training, and her sensibility comes from somewhere else, from the Land of Awkward Musicians, the Joanna Newsoms, the Zach Condons, the quavery, the unsettling. Heather Trost from A Hawk and a Hacksaw helps out on violin.

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Even as he handed over his flash drive with five-odd Josephine Foster projects to which he’d listened to obsessively, my roommate was surprised to hear she was American, having believed the Colorado native was “Spanish or European or something. ” I can’t exactly blame him: borrowing alternately from Romantic classical, art-rock, and Appalachian folk and indulging in album-length adaptations of poetry by García Lorca and Emily Dickinson, Foster has sung variously in German and Spanish as well as in English. Her nebulous, nation-state-defying voice returns on Blood Rushing, a “story within a story” concept album that narrates the account of her author-insert Blushing.

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Whilst it would be a slight exaggeration – as a critic of some 15 or so years standing – to say that it’s an occupational curse being exposed to too much music before it hits the stores, the fact that music is so readily accessible 24/7 and the fact that it’s almost too easy to release it in one form or another means that focusing time and attention on just one new release is harder than ever. This a situation that almost unfairly prevented this album from Josephine Foster reaching the top of this writer’s ‘to review’ pile. Although given to this scribe by the irrepressibly enthusiastic Fire Records a good few weeks ago it moved to the bottom of the promo CD stack until some well-timed memory-jogging airplay on Cerys Matthews’ 6Music radio show exposed the errors in this listener’s review filtration system.

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