Jo Bartlett's third solo album, Ghost Tapes 1 To 9, is out today. You can listen to the full album on Spotify and YouTube or, better still, buy it for a bargain £7 via Bandcamp.
I've been fortunate enough to have a sneak preview of the album for the past week or so and, in short, it's thirty three and a half minutes of your life that you'll happily want to live over and over.
There's a consistent make up to the songs, not least sparse but considered instrumentation that manages somehow to sound full and spacious at the same time. The guitar and synths are underpinned by a mighty, rumbling bass on the majority of songs.
The Last One (Is The First) is a formidable opener, promising to be a striking instrumental until, two and a half minutes in, Jo's voice takes over. The vocals are of course the critical element that creates the cohesive listening experience, sometimes with effects, sometimes untreated, always focusing the listener on the narrative.
And it's compelling narrative, stories drawn from Jo's life in music. "I guess you'd say it started when I was less than two," Jo reflects on She's Got The Music.
Musically speaking, it's a further step away from Jo's previous album The Cut Up (2022) and a leap if you will from Upheaval (2011) and a direction that works exceptionally well. It feels a very lazy comparison as I'm typing it but I think I subconsciously made a connection with Andrew Weatherall, particularly Two Lone Swordsmen's latter vocal period and also some of his work with Nina Walsh.
Reflecting on that though, I think it's more to do with the soundscapes that Jo has created, not least the bringing together of electronics, acoustics and voice resulting in an album that feels organic, human and warm.
As I mentioned in my previous post in February, I belatedly (re)discovered Jo's music so I feel like I've had something of a crash course in her solo work in the past couple of months. It couldn't have been better timed though, given that it's led to today's release of Ghost Tapes 1 To 9, which is already a highlight of 2024 for me.
1) The Last One (Is The First)
5) [Do You] Remember?
6) She's Got The Music
9) Get In The Zone
Five of the songs have been released via Bandcamp (links above) in the past year or so, accompanied by videos, combining silent cinema, home movies and road trips to great effect.
If that's whet your appetite for more, head over to Bandcamp for more, including It's Jo And Danny, Bluetrain and Kodiak Island as well as her solo work, including this single from last June which doesn't appear on Ghost Tapes 1 To 9.
The summer has officially started.
....
As a completely unrelated footnote, you may have spotted a theme that this week's posts have all featured artists with surnames beginning with B.
Today's post was planned for today to tie in with the release of Ghost Tapes 1 To 9, but the rest was initially an accident. I started off on Monday with Emily Breeze, then noted the coincidence that I'd found the videos for Boris Blank's current album the following day. Wednesday's random shuffle seemed to have broken the cycle with T. Rex, until I quickly realised that really, the post was all about Marc Bolan. I'll 'fess up, having embraced the inevitable, yesterday's post about Kate Bush intentionally sought out another B-surname artist.
Normal service will resume tomorrow with (if I can get my act together) a delve back into my dusty box of cassette compilations.
I'm loving your detailed and in depth write ups of artists I'm not familiar with. Thanks for continuing to expose me to new and great music.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Mooz! I really need to get back to your blog and leave some comments. I have been loving your marathon month of artist mixes, quite a few are new to me too.
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