Jana Horn, Cy March (Poetry), Reese Florence
Jerry’s On Front
2341 N Front St.
Philadelphia
Jan. 31, 2026
Saturday night, Jerry’s On Front played host to a night of quietly demanding music, and, during Texas native Jana Horn’s set, a brief symposium on the weather: some of us said we didn’t like it, even hated it; some said they loved it. I chimed in that I specifically like how all the snow makes you feel like you’ve woken up in a city, like you flew to Alaska on Ambien or something. (Which takes were hot and which were cold? I’ll let you determine the rubric.) Jerry’s functions primarily as a shared rehearsal space rented out by several bands – I’ve rehearsed there a handful of times – with a few different locations (I think this was “Jerry’s 1”) but they also host shows on a makeshift stage, whose backdrop is wide windows facing North Front Street; I love spying the occasional gawking or bemused reactions of passersby and commuters getting off the El. The space and show were run by Chris Forsyth, the long-running guitarist and improviser. Just days ago, the stage hosted the lo-fi power pop of Chicago’s Sharp Pins, for an R5 show; this was sort of the musical inverse.
Local songwriter and Germantown resident Reese Florence kicked things off, playing electric guitar and singing, seated alongside Will Currier on pedal steel. (They were occasionally joined by the rumbling sound of the distant El passing through, carrying people here and there, always a shuddering of distant noise, like a giant’s tambourine.) I’ve seen Florence several times, each a little different, and never with Currier; this time around, she conjured the starkness of The Lioness-era Songs: Ohia or Cat Power circa Moonpix (or Grouper, more recently), performing with marked poise and preternatural calm. Florence is very soft-spoken, and their songs gently sway like a sea anemone. The songs don’t have spikes in volume so much as melodic action; at the center of it all is a singing voice that has a strangely beautiful allure and depth. (As Jana Horn put it later, shouting out her bill-mate: “What a voice, what a voice. So pure and all its own, so surprising where it goes…”)
Horn and her band were in town from New York, on the second night of a two-week tour in support of their new self-titled LP, which they performed, re-sequenced, in full, unfortunately sans pianist Miles Hewitt. (They’re calling it the Deep Car Tour and selling hats that say “deep car” on them and I almost copped one. I don’t know why but that has a cellar-door-esque ring to it for me.) Maybe it was just where I was standing, but the room felt like an even more precious and intimate space (Horn called it, I’m paraphrasing, “a funny tunnel”) once Horn’s band took the stage. They were as connected to the audience as they were to one another. The band – Horn on tenderly-strummed, barely-there electric guitar and singing, Adelyn Strei on synth, flute, clarinet and harmonies, Jade Guterman on bass and Adam Jones on drums – was minimal but evocative, similar in energy and to the slow-motion musical and poetic noticing of Florence’s work. Fans of Mark Hollis’ solitary LP would appreciate his and Horn's shared sense of patience, of song as arranged, sustained breath. Horn holds an MFA in fiction writing, and the lyrics are crucial to a full appreciation of her work, and they’re readily legible on the studio versions. At Jerry’s, something about the mix made the words a little murkier, but in the set’s best moments, Horn was like an actor perfectly cast, and the sound of the words and her phrasing alone could carry the scene: I could close my eyes and, like extreme weather or a quiet revelation, I’d been transported miles away.
