Overlooked Classics: Common Holly- Playing House

There are some artists who make albums that should have been huge. Better known by her stage name Common Holly, Brigitte Naggar is a Canadian musician from Montreal.As Common Holly, Naggar has released two full-length albums, but her debut is so underrated it beggars belief. It’s so fully formed, it’s astonishing.

Naggar’s first album, Playing House, was released in 2017. The album was originally self-released on Bandcamp, before later being widely released by Solitaire Recordings. It’s a beautiful thing indeed, an intensely personal piece of Americana with one foot in the Dust Bowl, and one on an effects pedal.

The songs, which are intensely personal, seem simple enough initially, with Naggar’s lilting girlish vocals, a strummed acoustic guitar and violin, but then they start to unravel. Creaks and drones appear, like ghostly interlopers in a big house. Here though, within the context of such assured songwriting, these spectres are benign presences, almost welcome.

Naggar’s most obvious comparisons would be Mazzy Star, Lisa Germano, Laura Veirs and Odetta Hartman, aa well as the early albums by First Aid Kit, but as with the aforementioned, she occupies her own little space. It’s a disarmingly lovely debut.