My Review: Jo Beth Young - Broken Spells

 Jo Beth Young - Broken Spells

"Not knowing when dawn will come, I leave every door open."

Emily Dickinson

A silent gathering drives the music: from that practised by all escapes this higher order that is organised by a celestial troop, to make it much more than an emotional event.

In this restricted organisation, the one written, composed and sung by JBY is certainly the spearhead, the clear representation that there is an effluvium that makes smells the guardians of a pleasant and essential stunner. Because the English singer with her new sonic painting builds bridges, waterfalls, embraces for an encounter that has several concepts to express, which makes her a citizen with a passport that allows her to arrive in every land willing to sow the seeds of this extraordinary tribute to conscious work in her listeners.

This happens when Broken Spells penetrates the soul: one becomes a travelling resident like her, a soul in non-stop transit.

There are several novelties compared to the previous Strangers: in these five years, the study of singing and the construction of the waves that make her songs a short circuit of an elegant, graceful and full of inspiration cosmos, finds important specifications, giving, in addition to her folk style contemplating atoms of World Music, a greater presence of fine, vital electronics, never pompous or inappropriate. Rather: an ensemble that creates a unique idyll, magnificent and full of colourful bubbles, as if a rainbow inhabited it.  One thus finds oneself swimming in its celestial space with greater intimacy and an incredible unforeseen reality. Listening stuns, enlightens, makes the skin of the heart moist, with the sensation of experiencing a continuous suspension in the face of everyday distortions: she grants us hope, emotion, the duty to seek a positivity that in her new compositions build an unassailable motion. A skilled multi-instrumentalist with clear ideas, she gathers musicians around her fingers with patience, quick to collaborate, to make these tracks a crowd of compact stars, building a sky of their own, slow, virtuous and infinite.

Peter Yates on guitar (Fields Of The Nephilim), Jay Newton on piano (Abrasive Trees), Jules Bangs on bass (Herija), John Reed on Steel Guitar, Ben Roberts on cello (Silver Moth/Prosthetic Head) are a combo aligned with Jo's project, a talented condenser, who moves inside the clouds, with the task of keeping the initial ideas rarefied, but bringing them fearlessly in front of eternity.

She seduces and conquers the certainty that this artist is able to bind the past and the present in that mystery, fear, conscience and turmoil are perfectly aligned, in a form of discipline that does not contemplate mistakes, superficiality and dastardly choices. Perfection: there it is, achieved, defined and shown to stun like an earthquake of slow kisses, oblique but never venomous glances, because sweetness for Jo Beth is an overt act of respect. As one listens to these new ten blinks, one can definitely feel her maturity in creating a concept album, sonorous, emotional, the range of her secrets shown almost completely, with the conviction that some are left in her hands, perhaps to be presented in the future.

The attitude is to give this modern bouquet with the imprints of electro folk, ambient, artpop, progressive, a chance to connect with a mood that brings out the instinct of baroque music that is surely within its sensibility, perhaps unconsciously, but that does not matter. What is important is the bright beam of synapses in contact, in the miracle of different epochs, of an acclimatisation with history and the future, here placed not as a hypothesis but as a territory in which these notes already construct it.

Her voice is a velvety driver, without neurosis, without annoying jerks and also a polite walk between colourful changes of register, a gentle tide that uncovers the nerves, a tale read slowly with attention and care. There is no need to bother other singers, to make comparisons: serious listening shows her unique identity, capable of making us experience the pleasant condition of a marriage between her uvula and our ears. But do not think that music is a pillow, a blanket, a stick on which everything is touched to create condensation. Absolutely not: it is a continuous breath, a parallel journey, an ensemble of natural identities with the wise authority determined to coexist with these vocal vibrations for a collective that also has a way of showing individual validity.

Let us not make the mistake of making this album merely a list of compliments: we need to experience it, to make a solid participation, to become music ourselves in order to understand the dynamics that have allowed Jo's to create not an event, but what this artistic expression should normally be, the biomechanics of an educational and exploratory work for our souls.

Penelope is blonde: she builds and unbuilds to give the dream a soundtrack that keeps fantasy a constant, because reality is no longer able to give her space. Beth succeeds, in abundance, with quality, melting the badness, harnessing this harmful human nature with her elegant propensity to show another dimension, possible and indispensable.

She brings the area where she lives (Northern Ireland) into the centimetres of our imagination, stretching the idea we have of those places, creating aquatic movements where there are clods of earth instead, in a wonderful opportunity for transformation, making possible the contact between the real and the dreamlike. Her mental laboratory illuminates the wind and, when the songs find the light, listening to them means writing an incredible new story.

Broken Spells represents an opportunity to feel the heavenly face stretching out its hand, as if its intention was to generate our peace: it takes less than an hour to have a master guide, to find oneself in enchantment, to feel lighter...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

10th March 2024

https://jobethyoung.bandcamp.com/album/broken-spells