Gently polite songsmithery, with a claim to be somewhere between JAMES TAYLOR and BEN HARPER is a tricky thing. JORDAN KOLTON plays with accuracy and a smooth touch. His voice is warm and sweet. His arrangements are light, subtle and supportive. He seems like a really nice guy.
But overall, the effect of his CD is soporific. The strumminess of the acoustic guitar is OK as a guide harmony for a later production. But 40 years of folk-pop singers have pretty well exhausted it’s value as an indicator of wholemeal authenticity. The grisly spectacle of the likes of FRED DURST doing "unplugged" nonsense on MTV has given it a nearly impossible role as an itchy and scratchy token of "real". What I'm saying is that on the beach, in the bedsit or in the back of a bus we can accept that casual hammering off and on while the chord is stroked. On record though, it’s been done to death and beyond. And bongos? Please, no. No more bongos.
Jordan seems to be that sort of genuinely benign human who will create a good atmosphere in a musically undemanding group of friends and passers by. Each of them will want to buy and love the CD. But without that personal contact, there is not enough creative/expressive artist in there to go around. We're listening (aren't we?) from the standpoint of a sceptical purchaser who is looking at the racks that have NINA NASTASIA, JOHNNY DOWD, BILL CALLAGHAN, BONNIE "PRINCE" BILLY, and RICHARD THOMPSON competing for our attention and money. Not to mention the fierce talents of less well known people like JON STRONG, NIALL CONNOLLY, OWEN MCAULAY and more yet.
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I've listened through and listened through and each song has a mid-tempo, slightly syncopated ebb and flow that leaves me searching around for landmarks in an unchanging terrain. A nice double bass line. With or without bongos. A violin or a bit of percussion. It's limited.
Lyrically, an unsteady oscillation between careless abstraction and cloudy metaphor leaves me grasping for meaning, and lost for an image. How do you read: "misery loves company / so build those prison walls wide / and whistle while you toil / you built yourself inside / when the hammer drops I will be standing firm / when the cites flood and the forests burn / when the lightnin' strikes you get one good turn in your ashes / but the weather here is fine and sky is gonna shine before it crashes"? Even the most perverse of Dylan's lines make words like these seem opaque. So I'm puzzled but never startled. My mental erase function keeps kicking in and I can’t remember what we started with, what he's on about now or where he's going next.
The killer blow is the lack of independent melody. There is little on offer here other than call and response phrasing inspired by standard chord changes. One song blends into another.
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