Nick Jaina on Daytrotter
Nick Jaina’s made really good records in the past – really good records. We’ve involved him here on a number of occasions for such reasons – these really good records. But he’s made a spectacular jaw-dropper in the just released “A Bird In The Opera House,” an album that startles and makes you swoon to it and its easy beauty. Its songs are full of delicate loves and the troubles with them, floating on flimsy clouds and negligent stars/moons and sentences, working themselves into heady folk country as well as undeniably sleek and ruffled pop in the style that George, Paul, Ringo and John used to make way back when. It’s an album that is somehow entirely his own and yet incorporates some of the finest young songwriting voices and styles into these dozen songs of widespread texture and discourse. There are elements of Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, Luke Temple’s new Here We Go Magic project and more, affecting us in a way that feels like tickling feathers and tickling fires, like a night cast as a tipsy lover, and a lover that still has us entranced by every movement and every syllable. It’s also a lover who’s not at all completely figured out – still shaky and still a bit of a mystery, even after all this time. We’re going home with that lover – it was going to happen like that anyway – but it all feels perfectly in place. read more.