Things That Make You Go Hmmm.
This being one of them: 19 year old CHRIS JONES and his album ‘Lonesome Jonesome’, 8 lo-fi tracks of one man and his acoustic guitar. It’s difficult to know where to start with an album that is so freakish and untypical that it defies categorisation and is so uniquely bizarre that the need of a review is rendered virtually redundant. This truly is music that can only be conceptualised by actually hearing it and even then you’re on dodgy ground.
As I drown with inarticulate desperation I’ll grasp out for some labels. ‘Lonesome Jonesome’ is a kind of dark and unsettling urban folk/blues that throws out twisted shapes and sounds that may or may not hint at a violence and a menace not yet realised but which unnervingly still lingers somewhere at the back of your mind, like an unformed nightmare ready to pounce into your gullible consciousness.
As the album progresses it generates an oppressive presence that should be repellent but instead draws you into its hypnotic core. JONES’ near unintelligible rasping vocals are like the whispered mutterings and confused ramblings of a madman who lies in a drunken state somewhere between Tom Waits, Mark E Smith and Willie Nelson. Perhaps the most disturbing display is on the brief ‘Hello To The Sun’ where his regurgitated repetition of the word ‘hello’ makes an innocuous universal greeting sound like the most threatening word ever committed to record.
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As Hank Hill once uttered: “The boy ain’t right.”
On ‘Staring At The Sewer’ JONES perhaps achieves the greatest success with his peculiar brand of crazed folk/blues, imparting an oddly compelling sense of lonely heartache within the skewered music.
By the time the last track ‘Axe’ comes around you’re grateful to be able to escape the restless suffocation that JONES emotes but you’ll also be likely to find yourself going back to this strange fruit, at first drawn by a nagging disbelief that you’ve just listened to something like this and then in an attempt to find reason in the warped rhyme.
Approach with caution but give it the benefit of the doubt.
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