Junkboy - Three

is a nice album. O so nice.

Brothers Mik and Rich Hanscomb, who lead the Junkboy family from their Brighton residence, are undeniably good musicians, and they apparently like to show off their classical culture, with well-built fugues in a minor key (‘Tonight’), variations on the pentatonic scale (‘Kamo River’), or a very baroque flute (‘Red Firecracker’).

From this structural basis, they produce a prog album in which the drums try to find Robert Wyatt’s sense of jazz, but which remains too pretty, too ambient, too hushed. Very often, you think that something is getting started, the melody reminding us of Erykah Badu in ‘There Is Light’, or the guitar that may be influenced by Ry Cooder (‘Fidlam Bens’); but it all fades away without developping into anything. No expression of frustration here though, no withdrawal symptoms for Junkboy, the lack of meaning being replaced by ethereal, soothing atmospheres.

This music has nothing to say, but says it pleasantly: in short, an art of rhetoric, which reveals an intelligence, a talent, a culture, but no depth. A music made to fill a void, maybe a music of our time, but one has a right to prefer looking for something else, in art, that the reflection of an unsatisfactory zeitgeist.

One has also a right, nevertheless, to enjoy this, after all, nice album, which certainly can’t hurt anyone, and whose listlessness is admirably pleasant.