Album Details

• Artist: Jeff Hill
• Album: No One Sees It But Me
• Label: www.myspace.com/jeffhill434noise
• Year of Release: 2010
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: patchen on 2011-01-06

Jeff Hill covers all the typical freak folk, territory: broken, off-key guitar, sqwawky vocals on songs about murder, drugs, dysfunction on a cosmic level, etc. But “No One Sees But Me” is endearing nevertheless. Yeah, trust-fund-college-kid pretending-to-be-an-Outsider artist is played out and insulting to actual out-of-the- Hip/Irony loop-regular-but odd folk who do their best with whatever instrument is lying around, (I have no idea about Hill, other than that he is from Virginia and this is his third release) the songs here swing and teeter in more or less genuine fucked-blues fashion, especially “Drama Queen” and “He Must’ve Got a Good Batch.”

Instrumentals “Indian Summer” and “Over and Over Again” have a twisted meditative feel that are starker than the rest of the set. Likewise, “Zip it,” another instrumental, is driven by a swirling psychedelic guitar line that is truly inspired.

Pedigree notwithstanding, if this is truly the best that Jeff Hill can do with a guitar, then “No One Sees It But Me” is a winner that stands out from most similar fare. If not, then it’ll be cool to see what he does when he admits he can really play the guitar!

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