Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The poet, whether armed with guitar, piano and possibly even a generous loving violin or the thunderous confident tones of well oiled and lubricated voice, with expertise is able to take a moment from the past and turn into something that can border on the exquisite, or crushingly, to filled with future optimism that it loses its buoyancy, its grasp on the real and ventures unwittingly into the absurdist fantasy beloved of the broken and bemused.
It seems that there must always be the air of melancholic anguish wrapped up in ever the most upbeat of songs, no matter if the guitar suggests otherwise or the piano dares to play a different tune, the beauty of a natural song is that it must reflect the pathos going through the musician’s thoughts. This is something that is captures with sheer honesty throughout Trevor Jones’ album To The Bone.
The past is more than another country, they don’t just do things differently there, the clarity of vision is such that at times, where it should be faded, disjointed, unfulfilled, it is in the hands of some, a weapon of desire, the unconscious thought that makes every moment vivid, vibrant and so lucid that it comes across in the musician’s messages. Like Billy Joel before him, Trevor Jones takes his songs and moulds them to capture specific times, rampant images that allow the listener to join him at the defining, detailed times.
To the Bone is clean, undistorted, it offers a salvation and a curse of melancholic discovery that clambers all over the listener’s emotions like a wolf hiding deep in a cursed forest waiting for the traveller to stray from the trail prepared for them.
Songs such as Pardon Me, Some Kind of Surrender, Angelicana, Fireworks and the damning beauty of Somewhere North of Here linger in the memory as if they were being drawn upon your own past, as if Trevor Jones was planting seeds of his worth into your mind and allowing empathy and a huge measure of compassionate to wash over you.
Poets cannot capture the future, it’s too sterile, to unedifying to contemplate, however, as Trevor Jones proves, they can conquer the past with gracious intent.
Ian D. Hall