It is nigh on impossible to pick a single highlight from Julia Holter‘s stunning fourth album Have You In My Wilderness, but for its sheer cinematography ‘Vasquez’ is as good a choice as any. In it, Julia enigmatically tells a tale of the gold rush of nineteenth-century America and her tapestry is woven over a soundscape that is just as striking and precious as any of its hauls. It is a hazy, slow-burning melting pot of modal jazz and spaghetti western tropes that has whispers of both John Coltrane and Ennio Morricone dancing across it.
It is a song that brings to mind Sun Kil Moon‘s recent opus ‘Gustavo’ for a number of reasons, with the similarities running far deeper than the use of Latin American forenames in both titles. The narrator sets the scene around themselves as they slowly sketch out details over a time span of roughly seven minutes, and the music ebbs and flows in time with the unveiling of said details without ever being merely incidental to them.
