THE REVIEWS
"Overwhelmingly the work of [a] musical maverick."
-The Word Magazine
"Softly sung, subtly strange. high life guitar from Venus.a compelling, multi-faceted world of [its] own. What a find."
-Shindig Magazine
"Unpredictable and oblique, shape-shifting.dazzling creations with equal measures of substance and style. Highly recommended."
- Direct Current Music
“Warm Robot's understated, thoroughly enjoyable guitar pop shows that Olive's strengths are her own. lush textures and quiet elegance. an excellent release.
-Allmusic.com
"“a strong and impressive debut. extremely harmonic and absorbing .oddball arrangements. wonderfully wonky. surprising and frequently delightful. A real winner.
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-Jerseybeat Magazine
"Olive creates wonderfully odd pop tunes .Latin and African percussion and droning, virtuoso guitars against catchy melodies and massed harmony voices just the right side of dissonantthe best of what truly quirky pop has to offer. Beautifully strange and strangely beautiful."
-The Big Takeover
"Jen Olive creates a delightfully skewed folk-pop hybrid that matches Marina Diamandis robot for robot and has hooks to spareso catchy youll forget most music aint made this way. all quite, quite lovely."
-The List (UK)
“Beautiful intricate pop creations. We'd be willing to bet this young lady will be a major contender in the years to come.”
-babysue.com
“One of the most strikingly individual albums we’ll hear all year”
- Wears the Trousers Magazine
Albuquerque’s Jen Olive released her debut album, Warm Robot, back in March on Andy Partridge’s Ape House label. Olive mixes magic with the terrestrial by way of her unique swerving finger picking style, melodies, and affixed floating harmonies. Singular, but not quite otherworldly, her instrumental runs intermittently incorporate intriguing asymmetricalities. Perhaps a clue to a fourth dimension, there’s a feeling throughout that if we just let go of what’s holding us down, we could fly, or at least float.
-Parasites and Sycophants
Jen Olive is an excellent guitarist, and not just technically. She builds songs out of riffs – astutely tape-stitching them together until they ellipse, propel themselves forward, and end up resembling something musical.
In fact that sums up Olive’s songwriting quirk as a whole, her debut album Warm Robot never plants both feet on the ground, and instead capers around the listener with a deep bag of tricks. Rigid, Longstrech-ian vocal melodies, neo-classical brushes, lucid, polyrhythmic drums; it’s experimental pop the way Eno would imagine it – allowing the listeners to bop their heads and decipher the snare at the same time.
Warm Robot certainly does sound like a labor of love, nurtured into existence through countless takes and studio babysitting (even the album’s most basic track, the single-minded “Boulevard” is well-painted over in textures) – and while that can go very wrong, Olive pulls it off. The tracks never sound produced to hell, in fact, despite the apparent crowdedness of the record, she keeps a certain level of minimalism to her work. The sounds her are sparse, aloof, existing in their own paradigm, cobbled together at the very end to make a song. Her voice splinters off in a dozen directions, only to be played back in perfect, mind-boggling harmony. Olive sounds like a world-worn experimental champion, which makes it even more impressive that this is only album number one.
-adequacy.net
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