My Review
Jo Beth Young - Adversity
The heart of a human being is no different from the soul of heaven and earth. In your practice always keep in your thoughts the interaction of heaven and earth, water and fire, yin and yang.
(Morihei Ueshiba)
The search for a philosophy that leads to personal balance is crazy for many people nowadays: the list of opponents and sceptics is getting longer and absurd forces are created to counteract this.
However, the magic of an intention backed by a pearl that seems to descend from the sky, fearless, strong as thunder, elegant as an oriental smile, can arrive.
Jo Beth Young is an angel whose voice sounds like a choir inspiring the muses of heaven: with her project, perfectly centred in this song that will precede the album Broken Spells, there is the thrill of a miracle that, to be such, has summoned Peter Yates of Fields Of The Nephilim and Ben Roberts.
You can breathe sacredness in a slow journey, with electronic music whispering words of love to trip-hop and world music, for seconds that seem to open the hands of your heart and which manage to convince the mind that only in balance one can have the possibility of contemplating oneself and one's surroundings.
Music like a mantra that is impossible to resist: Jo launches her words like a flock of birds in a precise emigration, towards her own well-being.
And listening to her becomes poetry and enchantment, a gymnastics of the mind that pleasantly leaves you short of breath.
Right from the start of the track you can feel how her voice, peaceful and full of veils, can proudly show an initial resemblance to the Queen of Punk Siouxsie, but quickly you hear all her timbre, which cannot be compared to anyone else, and then you are definitely seduced: the trails of the sky open up with light beats, Peter Yates' guitar becomes a glass that exhibits all its soul, like a hand gravitating around this voice that never stops taking flight to include a chant to the Buddhist goddess of compassion, Kuan Yin.
And it is a wonder: all oppositions melt away before the polite enthusiasm of a nature that seeks light and peace and curls up within Jo's voice.
Tremors, warmth, magic: they dissolve resistance and take up residence inside this treasure chest called Adversity, a new page, which steals our eyes in order to give an embrace to the world.
And to be able to read that richness that Jo has generously offered us is definitely a stroke of luck that we did not expect.
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
