KEVIN BLECHDOM @ Echo

8:30pm / FREE / 21+

Virginia Reed
If Virginia Reed’s debut album, She Is The Horse, were a cocktail it would be the delicious swill in the depths of a Jim and Coke. It’s unpolished and gritty. It’s raw and real. It accomplishes exactly what that last slurp of whiskey has in mind — it hits the fuckin’ spot.

…Virginia Reed is the solo project of Keith Hendriksen — a relatively unknown Hollywood troubadour whose distinctly lo-fi recordings tiptoe the line between catchy indie-rock and sweetly unrefined folk. But this isn’t folk fit for bales of hay and barnyards, it’s folk for the smokey venues and dim-lit lounges of urban cores. It’s less Norman Rockwell — more Upton Sinclair.

Virginia Reed chucks the standard acoustic-drums-strings format of folk out the window, and replaces it with a hodgepodge of multi-tracked vocals, noise machine sound effects, and a brashly strummed guitar. She Is the Horse covers a lot of ground on the musical spectrum by mixing experimental noise with classic folk. “Loveless Junkies,” the second song off She Is The Horse, features exceptional double-tracked vocals — as one line sails high and melodic, the other hangs low — emerging from the mysterious hollows of Hendriksen’s voice with a modest boom.

The album’s eerie edge is probably an adaptation of its recording locations. The tracks on She Is The Horse were reportedly recorded in mental institutions, rehabilitation centers, and trailers. This comes as no surprise, since Hendriksen’s uses his noise machine to give many songs ambient, swirling backings that sound like a pack of howling ghosts.

The record’s real foot-tapping, head-bob-inducing track is the outro “Little Did He Know” — which is speedy, with the quintessential folky twang and hard-luck lyrics. With the grainy bass line sounding like it’s coming out of a busted headphone, She Is The Horse concludes with the same pleasantly unrefined sound it begins with. Sometimes squalor is nice, and in a city inundated with over-produced pop music, Virginia Reed’s debut album comes through with a refreshing balance of a coarse sound created by polished musical techniques.By Whitney Hawke