From Dusted

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/4412

It's been a while since I last heard music from Inca Ore (a.k.a. Eva Saelens), though she was a welcome presence on Jackie-O Motherfucker's recent Valley of Fire. On Birthday of Bless You, Saelens folds snippets of eschatological breath and sigh into dark, blurry snapshots of psychological inquiry: these short songs, buried in the murk and flutter of tape hiss (it's as if the Dolby button was stuck in the ON position), are gorgeously indistinct. They have the quality of music that breathes very slowly, inhaling and exhaling at its own pace.

Saelens takes several minutes to enter "Creation," for example, and preceding her snail-trail siren song is the simple, poised patter of drums, ringing out like metal vats played over a bottomless well. She sounds like she's calling out from under a dulled record needle, trying to weave her way out of the grooves. On the blues plaint of "Lady Days," she obsessively itches at one note, hitting an emotional tenor and delivery – simultaneously compulsive and languid – that Cat Power has been chasing unsuccessfully for years. There's even a meta-cover of Merle Haggard's "Silver Wings," should you need an entry point, though Saelens's approach is reassuringly liberated, rather like Christina Carter's heartbreaking re-readings of classic songwriting on her recent Masque Femine.

By Jon Dale