Jess Klein was one of the artists featured on the Respond sampler, a benefit CD for a nonprofit organization from Somerville, Massachusetts, offering assistance to battered women and their children. This sampler with its all-female cast spotlighted the astounding amount of talent in and around Boston. Jess Klein's tune "Romeo" was a diamond among many gems, obviously worth investigating further.

Now after giving her first CD a good many spins, I have to say that I'm baffled and mystified. How come this record didn't go straight to the higher regions of the charts? Is it actually true that most people are sort of deaf when it comes to really good music?

Enough of my pseudo-philosophizing, back to the music. Klein is blessed with an extremely engaging voice -- sometimes she's whispering, sometimes she's crying out loud, but her voice never loses its charm. If there is a singing lioness out there, then her name is Jess Klein. She claims influences by the early Indigo Girls, Bob Dylan and Lucinda Williams; nothing wrong with that, but she also seems to have listened to the Eagles and Jackson Browne quite a bit. She certainly has evolved their almost exclusively easy-listening approach by her ability to add unexpected twists and turns to her sound -- as in "Solid Ground," which sounds a bit like an early America number to begin with, but only until Klein decides to break the song into a real rocker.

On two songs it's just Klein with her acoustic guitar, two ballads that need no further instrumentation because the lyrics have enough life on their own and her voice has enough power to carry the tune. One of these two songs is "The Wading Pool," about well-disguised wishes that never come true: "I've thrown in all my wishes / But nothing gets to you / You stand there too small for your britches / And I'm waiting to get through / With my nickels and my fingers crossed / And too much faith in you."

On "Strong Enough," Klein is (as on most songs) accompanied by a full band. On this particular song the band is the medium that drives the message home with all the required force: love is great, but better no love than love at all costs. Most songs are delivered with a good eye for detail, laid out beautifully with instruments that sometimes come in unexpectedly, be it the congas and fretless bass on "The Cloud Song" or the dobro on "Soldier" and "Angelina" or the violin on "Romeo."

The only thing that remotely resembles a fault on this album is the last track "Another Man Done Gone." It's not a bad track, but it somehow doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the material. This would have been good as hidden track, separated from the bulk of the music, just as a little extra.

Klein's record is full of memorable tunes, she knows how to weave a hookline and is able to write lyrics with a staying power. And she has that enticing killer voice. I think I've listened to the budding future of contemporary folk. If you want to be part of the future, then you should listen, too.

[ by Michael Gasser ]