Feast

“Charming Hostess makes music like no other... Thrown in with lively North African wedding songs and Eastern European folk songs are originals that display a proudly feminist, radical-Jewish, pro-sex sensibility. The blend lets listeners discover whether they can think and dance a the same time.”

“The songs on Jewlia Eisenberg’s album, “Trilectic,” are blithe and frisky. She sets lyrics about politics, jealousy and pizza to a world of styles, from klezmer to pygmy-style counterpoint, humanizing a great thinker while having plenty of fun.”

“A wonder of haunted American roots music, taking listeners from Yiddish laments to labor anthems via mystical twists and turns.”

“A year after Jewlia Eisenberg’s death, she’s still on the front lines, mixing it up with the bullies and authoritarians and raising her voice for lovers and liberation. A thrilling new album by her longtime band Charming Hostess, “The Ginzburg Geography,” details the anti-fascist struggles of the titular Italian intellectuals Leone and Natalia Ginzburg by setting the couple’s letters and writings to a gloriously diverse array of musical styles and idioms.”

“Trilectic is an album to file between Meredith Monk and Sweet Honey In The Rock. That's some space to occupy, but New Yorker Jewlia Eisenberg, now based in Oakland, California, covers a lot off stylistic ground, fronting the a cappella outfit Charming Hostess in a dazzling display of vocal agility, wit, emotional flexibility, and imaginative depth.”

“Charming Hostess is the finest anarchist-feminist-polyphonic-polyrhythmic-polymorphously perverse-balkan-blue-ish-Jewish-freak-funk-punk band working in America today. Their live shows are as fabulous and eccentric as their music.”

“Jewlia Eisenberg made her mark in the arts world after she became ensconced in an underground music scene. A multi-talented composer, vocalist, activist, educator, lay cantor and more, she was best known as the leader of Charming Hostess [for her] lively klezmer/punk/folk ruminations on sex, gender, history, religion, Marxist ideology and provocative ideas.” —

“Jewlia Eisenberg’s posthumous album pays tribute to histories of Jewish anti-fascism. Covering the Woody Guthrie classic “All You Fascists Bound To Lose”, feels frighteningly timely—but only if we misunderstand the present as cordoned off. You find yourself singing along to the eclectic mix of tango, swing, Bay Area punk, and incantation—the chorus “Revolution! Revolution!”. On “Guerra di Popolo”, Jewlia’s voice grows more powerful than the A/V equipment can bear. . . with more force than all the world she’s left behind”