Jiggley Jones – Not Your Typical Day Out
Jiggley Jones – Not Your Typical Day Out
URL: http://jiggleyjones.com/wordpress/
The idiosyncratic nature of Jiggley Jones’ songwriting is underlined by the title of his latest release. The ten cuts on Not Your Typical Day Out are filled with the shrewd observations of experience and character we’ve come to associate with his lyrical inventions. Jones and his musical collaborators work well towards ensuring those lyric concoctions are accompanied by substantive musical vehicles and the playing serves the song without ever lapsing into over-indulgent virtuosity. It has the sort of taste and discernment you expect from a performer whose graced prominent stages from New York City’s The Bitter End, Wilmington Delaware’s The Word Café, and experienced a fair amount of chart success while never compromising his musical vision. All of the awards and laurels he’s received never matter though. Jiggley Jones is still fluid, still resisting stasis and moving as an artist, and we’re compelled to follow along.
Much of Not Your Typical Day Out focuses on Americana themed music and traditional instrumentation and the bulk of those songs are in the album’s first half. “Danger Island” is different from your typical Americana/folk singer fare thanks to its peculiarly imagistic lyrics – Jones has already shown on previous release that he has a writing style all his own and that talent for crafting coherent imagery saying something substantial has only expanded with each new outing. “Wide Awake” has an elegant, swirling musical atmosphere and nicely understated literary effects in its lyrical content. Some of our greatest songwriters, any genre, are those who internalize the understanding that listeners are well served by artists who present their ideas and stories with a minimum of fuss and this song embodies that. Another embodiment of that principle comes with the moodier track “Del Alma” but, despite its moodiness, none of the songs on Not Your Typical Day Out flirt with what listeners might deem outright despair. The loose, yet layered, vocal approach Jones takes throughout the album pays off on this song and “That Pearl”, albeit in different ways. The latter tune is a little riskier, gambling with traditional setups through production effects and a new approach to sound, but nevertheless remaining recognizably tethered to his core sound.
The tempo of “Flow” picks up near the song’s end, but much of the first half is a swampy, shimmering cut built around understated guitar lines soaked in shadow and an emotive blue harmonica wail that perfectly matches the song’s mood. “Restless” has a title implying a much busier musical character than the preceding tunes, but Jones takes the same relaxed approach and concentrates on weaving a dense, but never too intricate, stitching of sound. Not Your Typical Day Out comes to an end with the track “Rain” and Jones’ writing, lyrically and musically, covers a relatively astonishing amount of melodic ground in just over four minutes. It’s a wonderfully envisioned ending for the release and there can be little question, on the strength we hear in tunes like this, that Jiggley Jones is working at his peak right now with no end in sight.
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Mindy McCall