What a rare pleasure is solo Kristin! I don't think that anyone else out there is doing anything quite like what she is - this kind of dark, poetic, harrowing/pretty, urgent/languid, oblique/confessional folk-pop - and The Grotto is every bit as special as was Hips and Makers. There's something very sinuous about the album's allusive (and, for that matter, elusive) progress, as Hersh charts her downbeat, fractured musical and mental landscapes, for the most part using only voice and acoustic guitar (occasionally, some ghostly piano and violin can also be heard), and the songs tend to blend into each other in a sort of narcotic, night-fog haze..there are melodies, yes, but no real verses or choruses - just fraught, dream-like vocal lines, often repeated and seeming to float up and down and around again.
Although I couldn't listen to it every day, this is one of those albums that really takes its listeners to another place - it's all rather stark, but it's beautiful at the same time.
