Jeffrey Foucault
Miles From The Lightning

There are albums with perfect covers, almost a true and genuine transfiguration of sounds into a single, emblematic image. That's exactly what "Miles From The Lightning" is: listening to it is like finding oneself in a black and white photo, where everything is a nuance, where everything has the opalescent and soft colors of memory, and the quiet and menacing sadness of a sky, or a soul, clouded with anger and omens.

Born in 1976, the dark bard from Wisconsin, Jeffrey Foucault, has implemented from this debut - dated 2001 - a precise and radical stylistic choice: tradition. And the desire to grow up quickly. Yes, because by letting himself be guided by listening alone, Foucault is inevitably attributed well over his thirty years. Every fountain of my youth/Is just a well gone dry, and perhaps this is the key message that Foucault desperately wants to transmit through his music. A sort of rebellious resignation to a maturity that is, first of all, fatigue and awakening from every illusion, including that of love.

A dark and powerful voice, rough and melancholic like an evening with too many beers and not even a woman to hold, Foucault reels off in this album fourteen ballads and over seventy minutes of pure folk splendor. Acoustic guitars with a cold and perfect sound, shining and chiseled sounds like jewels, plucked and lulling melodies alternating with obsessively rebellious riffs. And above all, the lyrics. Lyrics that speak of dark loves, doubts, anger, anonymous cities, and highways illuminated by moonlight. Lyrics that are desperation and desire for union (But I'm lost/And so much want/To be found), that are love (Love is patient/ Love is kind/ But let's be honest/ Love is a catalogue of deadly sins), that are the memories of a Vietnam lived as in another life (In 1964/ I was seventeen years old/ I got caught up in the draft/ I did like/ I was told/ And spent a pair of too long years/ Too young to be so old).

But it is in the softer and more melancholic tracks that Foucault leaves the subtle balance between great craftsmanship and true art to venture into realms of absolute beauty and impact. Thus, the delicate "Walking at Dusk" shines melancholic with mother-of-pearl glows, like a sea ruffled by the wind in a melancholic, endless autumn. Or the enigmatic "Californ-i-a", perhaps the masterpiece of the album, which remains suspended in the tense chasm between the anger of the lyrics (If I had the stars/I'd throw them on the ground/If I had the sun/I'd take and burn it down) and the lulling progress of the guitars, unsure until the last on which path to take between major and minor tones.

A dark and confident album, a blend of sounds and sensations always different with each listen, an American Whiskey to savor on a smoky, foggy evening, lost in the meanderings of a past that just won't let go.