Jake Holmes
The Above Ground Sound

I know, I should talk about "Dazed And Confused"; about how Jake wrote it and how a cunning guitarist passing by snatched it away, to take it with him aboard his noisy dirigible. I know, I should talk about yet another story of missed appointments with fortune, of wonders churned out in the shadows for the benefit of other throats... And I swear, if there were no music on this album capable of nourishing my ears, I would eagerly delve into these anecdotes, but this record is overflowing with sounds to narrate.

A trio without drums or any percussion (they performed on the same stage where Tim Hardin explored similar timbral solutions over a soft vibraphone carpet, and opened a Van Morrison concert which would soon elevate similar intuitions to sidereal heights in Astral Weeks). Jake Holmes on vocals and bass is a worthy and intense actor of the small sonic dramas he composes. The lead guitar of Teddy Irwin is a Guild, a jazz guitar, like the musician's background, but the use of fuzz (introduced to it by his friend Zal Yanovsky, guitar of the Lovin' Spoonful) enriches its sound, making its unusual lines a tasty appetizer of the sonic courses that Lee Underwood would cook around the more powerful and flexible voice of Tim Buckley. The rhythm guitar of Richie Randle, perhaps precisely because it is less personal than the contributions of his two bandmates, proves to be the ideal glue, capable of moving from memories of Charlie Christian to proto-garage frenzies. The songs are the real protagonists. In a few years, this young songwriter's pen will deliver the poignant and unassuming masterpiece "Watertown" for Frank Sinatra (paired with Bob Gaudio, of course, but all the insights of that have already sprouted in this album); and try, yourself, to boast such a credible repertoire as to convince The Voice to stop being the seasoned crooner to become a heartfelt and devoted "interpreter".

Like Scott Walker, Jake Holmes drank from the source of the French chansonnier Jacques Brel, only while the handsome mysterious one devoted himself to ingenious covers, he decided to graft Brel's lesson into an improbable amalgam with Broadway tunes and emerging folk rock. Naturally, with such spicy dishes not everything always works out wonderfully, but when the recipe is well balanced, intoxicating flavors emerge: listen to "Lonely", with the fuzz souring the harmonic solutions which, if slowed down and diluted (sometimes to dilute and to deepen can be synonyms), would lead to the sonic maelstrom of Buckley's "Lorca". Listen to the fragile and hypersensitive tension between the guitar arpeggio and voice in "Genuine Imitation Life", the passion-swollen explosion of the refrain, and "American Gothic" by David Ackles will no longer seem like an album coming from nowhere, but just a wonderful illegitimate child. When the little cheeky trot of bass and guitar starts in "She belongs to me", you'd expect the entrance of Fred Neil's voice because we are in the realm of "Another side of this life". Finally, listen to the absorbed monologue on aging in "Signs of age", closing the album, and at the end of the journey, looking back, you'll find you've crossed in four minutes the bridge from Jacques Brel's existentialist France to Sinatra's Watertown (almost better than teleportation).

Of "Dazed and confused," which awaits you at the heart of the album, I do not want to talk, it's not up to me to map out the spaces of your amazement. There is no doubt that not everything on this album is resolved, that there is more tilled soil and scattered seeds than harvested crops. But if you do not only see the beauty of the butterflies, if you can also sense it in the promise of the chrysalises, then this album awaits you, generous with epiphanies.