When is enough ever enough?
I asked that question a few days ago.
To put it into context it was about purchasing vinyl.
The truth is that at some point someone somewhere should put a hand on my wrist as I reach for my wallet and say no, but the acquiring of vinyl, CDs and more really isn't about securing possessions as it may appear from the outside looking in.
What I am really doing is filling a need to hear more music, a very basic and unquenchable need to fill my head with sounds.
Blaise Pascal, the French physicist, mathematician, inventor and philosopher said in the 1600’s that ‘there is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every person’ and this led to the more populist claim of their being something missing in us all that can only be filled with faith.
Apparently it is a unique space that nothing else fits into.
I've searched my heart and that hole doesn't appear to exist, but one for music does, and this music shaped hole seems to be a bottomless pit.
It is because of this that every single day I find something new that is a salve for my ears, something that tames the savage beast that dwells within.
When people ask me how I apparently seem to be able to find new quality acts to listen to the answer is a rather simple one.
I don’t wait for the songs to come to me and instead I seek them out.
It was in this way that the paths of ‘The Bones of JR Jones’ and mine crossed.
Currently to be found in Brooklyn he is creating music that is as far removed from the sound of New York City as you could imagine.
Instead the tracks he has compiled together for his promotional release ‘Reliable the unreliable’ are four songs that sound like a historical snapshot of the US as a whole.
On ‘Ticket Home’ it’s the cotton fields plaintively calling out the story tellers last moments on earth as he wants to be taken from this life and delivered to another where peace can be found.
Then, as with most samplers, the flow is disrupted as instead of carrying on with the theme he slips into ‘Sweet Tooth Boogie’, a song that has an invigorating jazz/swing heart while at the same time has an echo of the Queens of the Stone Age hit ‘No One Knows’ skulking in the folds of its zoot suit.
Okay that’s a difficult to imagine, but instead of dismissing it you really should just delve in and hear it for yourself.
After that you may think that you have managed to gat a handle on where JR Jones is coming from, but then he slips in from another angle with ‘St James’ Bed’, a track that conjures up the image of a time travelling Antony Hegarty who has slipped back decades in the blink of an eye to play the blues.
Finally ‘Damn the Wind’ is the traditional sound of American folk that similar to those that precedes it doesn't wallow in the past, and rather evocatively brings an echo from it into the present.
Accomplished?
No doubt about it.
Entertaining?
Very much so.
Talented?
Damn straight.
So all that is left for me to do is provide a link where you can join me in some appreciation for The Bone of JR Jones.
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