“Maybe I am just the devil’s girl,” Austin native Jess Williamson sang in one of her early songs, each word croaked like something drifted up from the underworld. Williamson’s particular strain of folk is at once earthy and gothic, often seeming haunted by some invisible, vaguely tortured presence—a guitar creaks like an old staircase; the occasional pedal steel lick blows by like a sudden, inexplicable draft. Her songs are loosely structured and rarely have what you’d call verses and choruses; she prefers instead to let them unfurl into strange and twisted shapes. Sometimes she sounds like Angel Olsen or Joanna Newsom, but more often she sounds like a coyote—lonesome and half-rabid, howling into the sparse landscapes of her songs and then pausing, as if she’s waiting for an echo. Williamson’s debut full-length Native State is only seven songs long, but it unfolds at an unhurried pace that makes it feel expansive. She wrote it shortly after leaving New York City for her hometown of Austin (she describes that change as a “period of turning inward and spending a good deal of time alone”), and, fittingly, these songs luxuriate in slow rhythms, compositional elbow room, and moments of quiet introspection. The stirring, macabre opener “Blood Song” begins as though it’s being sung by a sleepwalker (“Who can say what’s really real when there’s a veil between what you kinda see and what you kinda feel”), but it gathers force and vividness as the song moves on. Like Williamson’s most powerful songs, “Blood Song” gives you the impression that you are watching someone weaving on a loom in reverse: as time goes on patterns unravel, solid ground disappears, and by the end the the very bones of the thing lay exposed. There’s never a shortage of the kind of music Williamson makes. Every generation has its own crop of banjo-wielding mystics singing about astrology, medicine wheels, and long-haired ladies, and—blame so-called hipster culture’s antique shop fetishism, or maybe just the commercial viability of Marcus Mumford—that lane feels particularly crowded right now. But that makes it that much more impressive that Native State stands out among this ever-refreshing crowd. Williamson is particularly good at braiding together nostalgia for the past with a gimlet-eyed (and often bitingly self-aware) view of the present moment. (There’s humor here, occasionally, so subtle and cutting that you might miss it: “I thought I saw something real in Barcelona, in Brooklyn/ But I’ve learned the power now of manic delusions.”) She paints scenes of “moon-bathing ladies” and measures time by Saturn’s orbit, but then chases these lines with expressions of such plainspoken clarity that they almost knock you off your feet: “Here I am at 25 and I can’t sign a lease,” she admits in the last song. “Mostly I’ve survived off people being nice to me.” Native State is often quite dark, so the last two songs—aside from “Blood Song”, perhaps the best she’s released yet—pop up like the first shocks of green in springtime. “You Can Have Heaven on Earth” is a warm, banjo-driven ode to nature (“Try as we must to touch what surrounds us/ All of us thinking what we can’t photograph, we can sing”), but all of the themes of the album really come together in the short, sprightly closer “Seventh Song”. It’s a song about finding a balance between solitude and codependence, between barrelling forward and standing still. Native State is a document of a restless spirit, a wanderer continually searching for the landscape that will best match the thoughts—and the songs—that rattle inside her. But she never romanticizes her wanderlust: She realizes that the very drive that moves her forward could easily result in a lifetime of dissatisfaction. The wisdom of “Seventh Song”, then, is how to find peace in stillness—even if it’s only temporary. You can almost hear the hum of the highway beckoning in the background, but in the album’s final line, she’s found the thrill of its opposite: “Do you know how holy it is/ Just to sit quietly with someone?” （http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18942-jess-williamson-native-state/）