- It feels like there’s a lot to say about Jen Gloeckner: so much that I struggle to know where to start. Let’s keep to the facts, shall we? Her new record, Vine, has already been doing the rounds, furtively, on some Australian airwaves for a couple of months prior to release, hopefully long enough to give something so richly strange time to breathe, before you need to consider shelling out a few bucks for it. Jen’s an Iowa native who’s been making records for donkey’s years. You might have some vague memory of her past stuff: Miles Away from back in 2004, got an Australian release through Björk’s own label, One Little Indian. You would’ve struggled to keep track of her since, which seems to say something about her profile as an artist: always on the cusp of breaking into worldwide awareness, without quite getting there. It’s still the way she operates today: how many other people can make bedroom records that feature members of Psychedelic Furs and The Police?

Sort of unbelievable that Vine is a bedroom record: it’s big and intricately orchestrated. This kind of lushness is beyond the capabilities or even the ambitions of most callow, young, bedroom dreamers. Some of that might seem to be an illusion, a spell cast by the intense volumes of reverb that engulf Vine. Gloeckner has always favoured a little bit of a soft focus, but here it’s like being underwater. A lesser artist would use that to disguise the cracks in their craft; but with Jen it’s simply a conscious -if very individual- stylistic choice. Every now and then I felt like I was listening to an unknown Dead Can Dance record, but again that’s as much because both artists hide plenty of depth in the murk, as it is because of the murk itself.

You’ll hear electro-pop, art-folk, dream-pop, darkly tribal and industrial beats and new-age bliss-out, it’s all in there. I’m often reminded of another relentless stylistic chameleon, U.S. Girls. Meghan Remy in her performing guise has a similar fascination with painting a series of vignettes using wildly diverse, if all darkly hued, stylistic palette.  Special notice to one of the most diverting forms Gloeckner keeps returning to -you’ll hear it on songs like Colours, Counting Sheep or Row With The Flow- that rich and melancholy, old-school soft-rock. It’s the sort of thing Roy Orbison did to perfection, but here with just a touch of Patsy Cline country rolled in; and then, of course, drowned in echoes.

Vine is a mature record, you can hear that just in Gloeckner’s deep and weathered contralto - which sometimes reminds me of Marianne Faithfull, without every being that genuinely wrecked. I don’t know exactly which one of her guests does the Leonard Cohen impression on Row With The Flow, but that pairing of giant old gravelly voices is particularly evocative.

At this point in a career, if you haven’t gone up over the top yet, well, it’s probably not going to happen. A record of this calibre, however, make you realise how hidebound, arbitrary and unreasonable the judgement of the public and industry tends to be. It’s a reminder that labouring in obscurity doesn’t say anything about the quality of the artist. Vine, by contrast, has an awful lot of good things to say about Jen Gloeckner.

- Chris Cobcroft.