Many times in the past I have referred to Mason Jennings as Minnesota’s contemporary incarnation of Bob Dylan – natch, Dylan was also Minnesotan. Alas, that comparison is getting increasingly difficult to maintain.
Mason Jennings came out of the gates years ago with his self-released, eponymous debut, a stripped-down and sometimes aggressive set of modern-era folk songs. Over the years, however, he’s been getting increasingly successful – good for him – and hence has been able to step up his production technique as well – not so good for him.
The charm of Mason Jennings’ songs has always been in the simplicity of the arrangements and the gorgeous lull of his deeply baritone voice. With an approach similar to Dylan in his spoken-sing-song vocals, Jennings always conveyed both emotion and urgency in his lyrics and his songs overall.
Now Jennings is back with a new album, Boneclouds, and it is his first to be released under a major label (Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse’s Glacial Pace, which is under Epic/Sony). The album starts off abruptly, with no warning or build-up, by launching into the first single, “Be Here Now”. It’s a decent enough song focusing on longing, but the one thing immediately apparent is that Jennings’ simple production of yesteryear is now gone. In “Be Here Now”, Jennings’ lulling voice gets lost in a sea of echoes during the chorus – it steals the beauty and the tender lyrics are made more trivial. As the song progresses, the production becomes increasingly apparent and the song suffers for it.
“Gentlest Hammer” follows “Be Here Now” and it features some of the strongest lyrics on the album. Starting off with a forceful drum intro, it’s easy to assume that Jennings is about to tear down the walls with an electric rock anthem, but it’s a ruse and the song lapses into a decent folk-inspired groove, all the while accompanied by its driving drum track.
The third track is a highlight. Maintaining the album’s theme thus far, “If You Ain’t Got Love” sings about love and loss. Thankfully the mixing on the song is kept to a minimum and the simplicity of old Mason Jennings is given a brief chance to shine.
Jennings has always played with his sound a bit, which is admirable but has in the past led to disastrous, if interesting, results. Occasionally, his experiments succeed and there is a successful example on the album – “Some Say I’m Not” is an almost tribal dirge with a soaring, prolonged chorus. On the other hand, “Where the Sun Had Been” is buried in production, replete with a synthetic choir, and so definitively lacks the beauty found so regularly on his earliest albums. The theme of the song is dark but the message is lost because the production makes the song inaccessible and a hard listen.
Jennings’ lyrics have also always been hit or miss: sometimes they are breathtakingly complicated (“If You Need a Reason”, which also features a gorgeous wordless vocal breakdown) and one would think the song would suffer as a result, but he somehow pulls and shapes them into something beautiful; other times, however, they can be rife with cliché and/or awkward (“Which Way Your Heart Will Go” with lines like “silver swing-set shining”). In the past, some of his best lyrical work was found in politically themed songs (“Black Panther” or “Dr. King”, both from Birds Flying Away; “Ballad of Paul and Sheila” from Use Your Voice) and those same songs came from some deeper anger in Jennings, but that urge has been mostly replaced by softer, more romantic yearnings on this new album. The weakest song on Boneclouds is the most topical one, the aforementioned “Where the Sun Had Been”.
Of extra note is the iTunes exclusive track “Things Change”. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but Jennings wrote a song titled so closely to a recent Dylan song (“Things Have Changed”) that it will only increase the comparisons already being drawn between the two.
Being a Mason Jennings fan dating back to the release of his first album, it’s hard for me to accept his evolution. I don’t want to deny him the ability to change, but I do lament the decisions he’s been making – his songs are either redundant, sounding much like what I’ve heard from him before, or his songs are lost and meandering, searching for some form of a new sound but still not quite finding it. He needs to leave the production box at home and get back to the band in the living room feel of his earlier albums.
Of course, the best songs on this album are the retreads, the ones that maintain the simplicity of his first albums, but they have a nasty habit of sounding the same – is “If You Ain’t Got Love” really that different from “If You Need a Reason”? That’s not to detract from their beauty, but he can do so much better. I almost wish Jennings would get angry and write a raging song a la “Godless” (from Mason Jennings), just to reconnect with the spirit of his younger self. These delicate love songs are all fine and good, but they also lack the fire necessary to make them fantastic.
GRADE: C+