THE NEW YORK TIMES You might call Ms. Foster’s eerie warbling old-fashioned, except that is evokes a scrambled past that exists only in her own vision: mountain songs that never were, spaced-out hybrids that never will be. -Sanneh

THE WIRE Fosters vocal style draws on a clutch of contradictory modes. It combines a facility for expressive extremes comparable to Patty Waters with the precise comportment of folk singers like Karen Dalton and Shirley Collins, and the kind of fast vibrato most associated with the flapper style of early Tin Pan Alley. Fosters recorded work draws much of its unusual power from a dialectic that reconciles a feel informed by the experimental underground with a more mainstream tradition as transmitted by artists as disparate as Josephine Baker and the McGarrigles. As such, her music exists in the same kind of liminal space as anachronistic counter-cultural figures like Tiny Tim, The Incredible String Band and R Crumb’s Cheap Suit Serenaders. -D Keenan

STOP SMILING Foster’s music is genuinely free, in that her songs move with little regard for convention, or safety. And then, of course, there’s her voice. Unquestionably the anchoring feature of all her songs, there is little to compare it to. At times, it’s like Joan Baez with all the bark peeled off. It’s got some of what might be called “Renaissance beauty,” but with the bones left jutting out. It sounds at once soft and self-assured, and unnerving and unstable. It’s not a voice for which there is an easy inroad, or a quick explanation – such qualities are to her credit, especially as she works within a scene that is incessantly summed up in terms of past influences, and image-making headlines. When Foster accompanies herself on guitar, her voice and guitar slip around each other so delicately and purposefully that even without standard percussive supplement, the songs suggest their own invisible, insistently spiraling rhythm. -Sam Sweet

ARTHUR She’s a Grace Slick for the 21st Century—and that’s all grace, no slick. An amazing combination of God-given ability and formal skill. You can hear Jefferson Airplane in her music, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Joan Baez…She’s also the one, out of that whole scene that has embraced the electric guitar, while at the same time being the most classical of them all. -Jay Babcock

NME The new first lady of folk Josephine Foster has still seen off all comers to become America’s most adventurous songwriter. Foster’s recent solo set was a bewitching blend of American gothic, psychedelic ragtime, nursery rhymes, folk and mountain music. The fact that at one point in today’s afternoon set her truly incredible theremin-sounding voice is overlaid with an impromptu rendition of Greensleeves from a passing ice cream van only adds to the effect. -Michael Lane

The Nashville Scene The luminous, earthbound folk songs of Josephine Foster open a window to the sublime Chicagoan Josephine Foster, a nakedly emotional vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, [is]that much more captivating for her reluctance to fetishize weirdness and whimsy for their own sake. Foster embraces the quotidian with a sense of wonder and possibility that enables her to spy windows that open onto something deeper and more abiding than the everyday. “Don’t hold it, behold it! / It’s not yours or mine,” she warbles in “The Siren’s Admonition,” immersing herself in the moment while playing swirling notes on what sounds like a cross between a sitar and a guitar. In a voice at once reedy and crepuscular, Foster persistently achieves something that, far from quaint or precious, is elemental and timeless. At her best, she transforms things that most of us take for granted into portals to transcendence. -Bill Friskics-Warren

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