Band of the Week: Tiny Vipers

Hometown:Seattle, Wash.
Fun Fact: Jesy Fortino worked at a McDonald's in the '90s when the fast-food chain was selling Beanie Babies with Happy Meals. She was frequently offered bribes from customers to save them the "rarer" Beanie Babies.
Why They're Worth Watching: Tiny Vipers' debut has all the intimacy of a neo-folk record without the genre's pretension.
For Fans Of:Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Joanna Newsom, Current 93

Some musicians have all the luck. A little while back, Jesy Fortino was in Seattle playing coffee shops under the moniker Tiny Vipers. It wasn't anything serious, and Fortino wasn't really looking for a record deal. In fact, she barely knew how to make her own demos. After recording some songs on her 4-track, Fortino turned to her friend Dean Hudson for help getting the songs onto her computer. Hudson listened to the tracks, liked what he heard and asked if he could re-record some of her songs in his apartment with a semi-professional setup.

"I didn't even really think about how he worked for Sub Pop," Fortino says. "One day he called me out of the blue and was like 'Hey, can we release a record? Will you record a for us?'" And just like that, Fortino fell into a gig with Hudson's employer, the label that arguably invented grunge in the '90s (see: Mudhoney, Nirvana) and is still responsible for some the most successful indie musicians today (see: The Shins, Iron & Wine).

But it would do Tiny Vipers a disservice to suggest that Fortino only got signed by mere happenstance. It's clear what Hudson saw in her music. The songs on Hands Across the Void are intimate -- think Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's work with Matt Sweeney -- and her lyrics can be disarmingly candid. This is never more apparent than when Fortino declares, "They laughed back when I tried to dance with you/ Because they tied my left to my right shoe," in the middle of "On This Side." Her voice is understated and bears a passing resemblance to Joanna Newsom -- only a little deeper and without the Lisa Simpson-like grate. And though most of Tiny Vipers' songs are usually just Fortino's multi-tracked vocals and an acoustic guitar backing, when she adds more instruments into the mix, like on the noisy outro of "Forest on Fire," her work recalls the best albums by bay-area, psych-folkers Six Organs of Admittance.

Fortino bristles slightly at the comparison of her work with any genre that contains the words "psych," "neo," or a certain five-letter f-word. "I think I get lumped in with the freak-folk stuff a lot," she says. "And I wouldn't put myself there. I think it's a misconception because none of my influences come from that kind of music."

Fortino, who first started out playing music in a goth band, is still more likely to put on an old Legendary Pink Dots' album as opposed to the latest Devendra Banhart. But with Fortino touring nationally, getting inappropriately pigeonholed -- along with other stresses of the road -- is going to become more and more common. "I'm just trying to psychologically prepare for it, I guess," Fortino says, nerves showing as she speaks the words. "It's a lot of work and I'm still learning. It's just scary. I never thought I'd be releasing something."