Jonathan Day
Album: Atlantic Drifter
Label: Niimiika
Tracks: 9
Website: http://www.jonathanday.net

Back at the start of 2011, I reviewed Jonathan's previous album Carved In Bone, finding it a puzzling release and hard to get to grips with; some very persuasive songwriting being compromised by what I felt was a sometimes mannered or eccentric vocal delivery, and presentation-wise by some nigh unreadable credits. And even during the intervening four years, I've found it difficult to glean many further insights from the album, although I could never dispute the sheer quality of the writing, or of the performances from Jonathan himself and his musician friends. So it was with mixed feelings that I received Atlantic Drifter, Jonathan's followup album, for review. And I have to say, I enjoyed Atlantic Drifter much more on first hearing than I did its predecessor - which may be due to my having gotten accustomed to Jonathan's style, at least to some extent. But it's still a bit of a puzzle, I find.

Jonathan's a very talented songwriter, with an acutely developed sense of spirit of place and a real gift for conveying it; naturally, therefore, the concept of genius loci is a primary focus for this latest collection of self-penned songs. Its composition stems from the bout of international touring that arose from the positive reception to his Carved In Bone album, this taking Jonathan to the US, Greece, Finland, Hong Kong, Thailand and China. These localities are reflected not only in aspects of the musical idioms in which the songs are couched - albeit not in an over-obvious sense - but also (more) in the actual locations in which the songs were recorded. Technophiles will be interested to learn that most of the recordings were "caught through valve desks onto two-inch tape" - although the majority of us wouldn't necessarily notice the difference. But there's certainly a noticeable, and compelling, quality of close-up intimacy that pervades these recordings. Instrumentation is decidedly sparse - no plethora of guest musicians here, just Jonathan's distinctive, deft fingerstyle guitar and Simon Smith's responsive, animated string bass for the most part - as Jonathan takes us along with him on his nomadic travels.

Hallmarks of Jonathan's style - the quiet confidence, the measured poise and gentle air of contemplation - are present as before, and if anything even more pronounced, and the overall impact of the collection is both attractive and appealingly varied, with a wonderfully clear recording to match. Atmospheric, restful, reflective, poetic, responsive - no listener can fail to respond to Jonathan's evocations of place and mood. On Sea Full Of Birds you can hear the whistling bird-calls wheeling around the busy guitar figures, and the eerie choral interjections are but ghosts in the machine of A Book Of Hours. Sita's Last Dance is a beautifully melancholy exploration of heartbreak and lovelorn contemplation recorded in Scandinavian locations, while the limpid fragments of melody of An Onnagata Kami Infest My Forest blow across from the Hong Kong tenement roof and into our deeper consciousness. Shallow Ground ingeniously takes up and runs with the emotion of parting contained in the original shanty Shallow Brown, and closing song The Darkling Sky finds Jonathan back home in the windswept hills of Shropshire gazing at his comforting native landscape newly informed and coloured by the experiences of his recent travels. The collection's wildcard track is Innocence Again (written by Robert Lake and Paul Wassall), a gutsy indie-garage-grungey piece full of electric guitar distortion and reverb, recorded at Appleton Firehouse in Minnesota.

In the light of all the positive impressions made by the music and writing of Atlantic Drifter, I really hate to have to bemoan the non-musical aspects of this new album, but my criticisms of the presentation of Carved In Bone apply even more to Atlantic Drifter. Like its predecessor, it sports some extremely appealing artwork - Jonathan's own drawings, further examples of which were showcased in his pre-album book release Postcards From The Road (which would be worth investing in, for sure). But significantly, like its predecessor, the accompanying text is very difficult to decipher indeed, at any rate the crucial detail of the basic tracklist, which is reproduced on the inner panel of the digipack in hard-to-read writing in off-white on blue. The supplementary performer credits, however, are located on the rear panel and perfectly readable (could these not have been transposed with a version of the tracklist?). It would have been good to have been given some background information in the package, or at the very least to find the lyrics printed somewhere too, if only on Jonathan's website - but alas this is not to be. I really do think Jonathan is taking the cryptic and minimalist nature of his art too far by not making the essential accompanying detail as accessible as his music.

David Kidman