Artist: Jenny Owen Youngs
Genre(s):
Other
Rock
Discography:
Batten the Hatches
Year: 2007
Tracks: 13
The Scrappy Demo
Year: 2004
Tracks: 6
Coming up strong behindhand R. Stevie Moore as the most talented singer/songwriter to be based in the nondescript chamber community of Montclair, NJ, Jenny Owen Youngs looks like Lindsay Lohan's indie-kid younger sister (though, ironically, the baby-faced Youngs is in fact about a half-decade old than the hard-partying actress-singer) merely sounds like an all successful spinal fusion of Liz Phair's perceptive and nervily comical lyrics and the orchestrated folk-pop of Regina Spektor and Erin McKeown, with barely a wind of Nellie McKay's jazzy floorshow leanings and Cat Power's throaty, confessional angst. Born in New Jersey in 1981 and raised in the common suburban surroundings, Youngs first picked up the guitar at the age of 14 and attended the music program at the State University of New York at Purchase at a time when that previously hidden prowess shoal was single-handed populating what would become the entire New York "anti-folk" scene: besides Youngs and Spektor, Jeffrey Lewis, Langhorne Slim, and the Moldy Peaches' Adam Green and Kimya Dawson were all SUNY-Purchase graduates. Maintaining a friendship with Spektor, world Health Organization chose Youngs as her curtain raising act on the tours following her breakthrough album, Soviet Kitsch, Youngs wrote and recorded her debut album, 2005's self-released Batten the Hatches. Although the album garnered in general positivist reviews, it attracted small notice until one of its highlights, the rueful "Screwing Was I," was put-upon in the second-season undoer of the popular overseas telegram sitcom Weeds. Signing with the Canadian indie Nettwerk Records, Youngs released a remixed and repackaged version of Batten the Hatches in early 2007.
