Jessica ‘Jesca’ Hoop is something of an anomaly in the kook-pop world in that her career seems to have been led by what could be easily construed as divine intervention.
Moving to Los Angeles in 2000, she began working as a nanny for Tom Waits‘ children. Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan took a keen interest in Hoop’s evident talents and introduced her to his publisher Lionel Conway, kickstarting her musical career. Her first record’s cast of backing musicians included none other than Stewart Copeland of The Police. A little further down the road, a phone call from Elbow’s Guy Garvey prompted the Californian to move to the distinctly less exotic Chorlton – an unusual move for a sun-kissed west-coaster but one crucial to the creation of her Hunting My Dress album.
It would be easy, then, to suggest that a large part of Hoop’s appeal lies in her association; that it’s a Lord Such-like placenta-link to ‘heavy friends’ that powers her obvious magnetism. Easy, and understandable. But totally unfair: Hoop is, and always has been, in a class of her own.
‘Memories Are Now‘, the eponymous track of her fifth LP, weaves in and out of conventional tempo-and-accent marking like a cosmic space-worm secretly schooled at the RAM. Using the barest of arrangements, it manages to be a glam stomper, a chugging four-to-the-floor heartbeat, a sparse paean to picking oneself up flitting over the simplest of basslines… which isn’t simple at all, as Hoop keeps changing the emphasis on beat and note seemingly at will with all the apparent skittering random complexity of the deepest intricacies of human emotion itself. This is articulation of the soul at its most eloquent.
