A Lame Way To Comfort Yourself

Quitzow “Better Than Ever” – It’s kind of a rare thing that I get to get to feature an artist who is from more or less the same region where I grew up. This isn’t to say that there aren’t many musicians in the Hudson Valley of New York, but rather that they either just are not to my taste — there’s always been a lot of earnest folky stuff, especially as you get further up into hippie country — or the artists don’t really do much in the way of self-promotion, and you just never really hear about them in the first place. The one major exception is Mercury Rev, who are terrific and kinda perfectly capture the aesthetic of the upper Hudson Valley and the Catskills, i.e., about an hour north of where I’m from.

Like Mercury Rev, Erica Quitzow lives and works somewhere up in the north of the Hudson Valley — New Paltz, I think? — but unlike them, her music doesn’t really have much to do with the upstate aesthetic. She specializes in a blend of live, acoustic strings and electronic pop, and her voice superficially resembles the cool, reserved tones of Metric’s Emily Haines. If anything, the music sounds European, even when she’s messing about with throbbing Timbland-style synth lines. Her greatest asset is her gift for writing strong, simple yet elegant hooks for strings. In particular, “Better Than Ever” glides along with a sort of menacing grace that contrasts with the track’s hesitant bass groove and stuttering percussion. (Click here to buy it from CD Baby.)