Jonquil: Point of Go – Review

My first encounter of Jonquil was the Manchester Ritz the week before Foals’ seminal sophomore work ‘Total Life Forever’ dropped. Supporting Foals they brought a charming sun-drenched earnestness, their calypso-pop songs gently underscored by just the right amount of melancholy. And listening back to their two almost-albums that were released around this period, you can see this fragile youthfulness perfectly encompassed in songs like Lions, a beautifully yearning singalong bizzarely accompanied by an accordion, which oddly works.

Their first two efforts were endearing, if not perfectly constructed. Whilst they may have not had the greatest level of songcraft, there was something in Hugo’s voice that just gave the impression that they “meant it”.

Since then, the band have achieved minor fame as being the big daddies in Oxford’s ‘Blessing Force’ movement, each member of the band with their fingers in many musical pies, most notably, the lead singer Hugo’s pop-chillwave project Chad Valley. This range of experience shows through on ‘Point of Go’ but not as you might expect, and not necessarily positively.

The band has improved and succeeded in all the places that don’t really matter, they are now more accessible, the production is undoubtedly sleeker and they sound like more confident and slightly more accomplished musicians. Yet the very basic heart of the songs hasn’t improved, the structure of each song feels like its been plotted and calculated to rouse emotion  in the listener, that same authenticity that made them worth listening to originally is all but gone.

On ‘Point of Go’ they construct painfully straightforward pop songs which borrow Balearic beats and production from the Chad Valley project and sa world-view and a few songwriting tricks that seem to recall Friendly Fires first album. However, the icy chillwave production that glosses smoothly over Chad Valley’s work is misplaced here. As a genre Chillwave is insincere and louche, composed mostly by Americans who trade in terms of ‘buzz’. For a band like Jonquil, who rely so much on emotion these tools feel out of place, one can’t help but feel there’s something success-hungry and cynical about this album. The comparison to Friendly Fires is matched in worldview but not scale, where Friendly Fires long for the bright lights of Paris and Sao Paolo, Jonquil seem to be shooting for a mid-afternoon set on the John Peel stage at Glastonbury.

 

 

This is nowhere more evident than in the central track Run, all Kate Nash style keyboards (not a compliment) and over-produced double tracked honeyed vocals, it sounds like the kind of record that is trying to sneak on to the XFM breakfast show by  virtue of being poppy and ‘a little bit whacky’.

In many respects, this album is all fur coat and no knickers, they’ve borrowed sounds and tricks from good artists rather than learning how to write like them.

Whilst all of this sounds rather scathing, it’s not a bad record; just a disappointing one. There earlier work showed promise, they had an interesting sound, and if they managed to perfect their song writing they could have made a brilliant record. Instead they come of as sickeningly  and theatrically earnest, you get the sense that with every song they’ve written they are very aware of what’s going on, it comes on like ‘Look we’ve cut everything out but Hugo’s voice singing a pseudo-profound lyric!’. The structure of some of these songs is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face. They had the authenticity that most bands only hopelessly imitate, they’ve traded this for nicer sounding guitars and sound like a cleaner neater self parody.

On the whole, it’s very palatable, distinctly listenable, but they’ve not crafted the kind of record I’ll find myself returning to again and again.