angels twenty - return home

Paradise Island
Step Away
Paradise Island (2002, single)

Calm, quiet, peaceful. These aren’t exactly terms you’d associate with Erase Errata, who’s always been nothing but edges and chaos and blissful guitar noise. But singer and trumpeter Jenny Hoyston’s solo project, Paradise Island, is a lateral leap into another world—still unpredictable and offbeat, but in the realm of the folk singer-songwriter. In a sense, she’s following a somewhat similar path to Tara Jane O’Neil, whose formative punk years in the early 90s and her current folk output are worlds apart, and yet share a certain unconventional wisdom. And so it is with Paradise Island, where Hoyston has painted a number of experimental soundscapes that share with Erase Errata’s work a break with convention, but with an otherwise wholly different sound. “Step Away,” off a Troubleman Unlimited limited-edition seven-inch, is the song that sounds most like, well, a song. In its own unassuming way, “Step Away” grows on you. Hoyston’s ability to sound completely unlike her strident Erase Errata persona is, at first glance, quite a shock. Only after considered listening do you realize it is, in fact, the same woman behind both projects, and it only makes the shy, sweet sound of “Step Away” that much more compelling.

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