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Cheer Up is a journey through darkness, self-loathing and doubt into the light and salvation…John Blek’s voice has never sounded better; it’s unquestionably his finest work yet.
John Blek‘s latest album, Cheer Up, is described as “entirely autobiographical from start to finish“, with songs drawing on the Cork singer-songwriter’s personal life (“not a record of who I am now but who I have been along the way”). Featuring three-piece Dutch harmony group Woolf and the Dresden-based viola/cello duo Broken Strings, this is Blek’s ninth studio album and, while not a Dylan goes electric shocker, something of a sonic evolution for a “more is more” approach to production.
It opens with the pizzicato plucked, airplay defying titled Holy Shit, a song about feeling a sense of helplessness (“lying on the bathroom floor/Been stuck inside for days”) in the face of overwhelming everyday events and trying to deal with his personal darknesses. It begins with the downcast line “take it from someone who knows/Living is a lie/Passing at a glaciers pace/Until you die” and the chorus that declares, “Everything means nothing/My blackened heart can’t take it anymore/I’m living for the sake of dying”. Yet, despite this, it’s infectiously catchy. A slow walking drum beat and circling electric guitar pattern carry the equally hummable Country Mile, which leavens the feeling of despair with the salvational power of love (“when I’m drowning/Neath the blue/It’s your arms that/Pull me through”) and carries the running theme that “this too will pass”.
Riding a pulsing bassline, Easy Now reflects back to his younger years, the teenage restlessness (“Mind was always racing, feet were always pacing”) and twentysomething boozing (“Sitting at the counter wishing I was sober…every drop I’m drinking trying to pull me under/I thought it’d set me free”), and finding life actually gets easier with the passing years (“Just because I’m getting older/Doesn’t mean I’m, dying/It’s easy now to find some peace of mind/Easy now to leave those days behind”).
Meteorologists will recognise the word ‘petrichor’ as meaning the smell of rain, and the percussive loping rhythmic Orange Warning draws on the weather imagery of gathering thunderclouds and storms as a pathetic fallacy for the tempests and power cuts in our own lives as we eventually emerge into a cleansing freshness of the morning, again here finding refuge in “the warmth of your arms”. However, while he’s earlier sung that dark days will pass, in Colour Of Sorrow, where he’s “broken in/taught to be like everybody else”, the line “just because it has been/Does not mean it will always be” has a more pessimistic portent as he finds blue the colour of sorrow in his lover’s eyes.
His Digressions #3 – In Dresden album, released this January, on which he first worked with The Broken Strings, was engineered by Arno Jordane, for whom Arno’s Song, another about the march of time, was written and titled. Acoustic there, it resurfaces as Arno’s Song (Reprise) with drums, a chiming electric guitar and electronica streaks to its walking beat, the new version giving the chorus a more uplifting anthemic crowd singalong makeover.
There’s more ringing chimes and punchy drums on Hold Your Tongue, the album’s strongest echo of 60s folk rock and an angry call to “prophets on bar stools” to “shut your mouth, quit spitting the bile out”, though its “you’re poisonous” invective at what one might assume to be angry protest singers, may also be self-directed.
The first of two successive tracks that tip past the four-minute mark, Giving Up The Ghost, is a glorious slice of emotional-depth pop that prompts glowing comparisons with Richard Hawley and is charged with the quest to “find a path worth taking” and “waiting for the chance to be someone you thought you’d be by now”, a spur to himself to “go live it as it is” and another about emerging from the storms (“the worst had passed and end at last”) with “my regrets so meaningless”.
The title track follows. An echoey vocal intro and slow handclap-style percussion punctuate the circling acoustic guitar pattern as it conjures thoughts of the brooding side of Lennon in its meandering late 60s folk phantasmagoria, the lyrics an encouragement to a friend or lover to break out of the grey day fog of depression.
And so, again both Hawley-esque in feel, it reaches its conclusion with the penultimate slow shuffling, strings plucked apologetic Headstrong (“you were right, I was wrong”) with its images of forging a mutually supportive union (“I’ll be the brawn you the brain”) and “cover the cuts with the gauze”, closing with the dreamily slow waltzing, strings-swathed redemptive Woman (“I was saved by a good hearted woman/With but nothing but her love to give me”, as “worn by the footsteps and the passage of time”, he acknowledges that “there are wars that cannot be won, there are wounds that cannot be undone” and, recognising “the damage I’ve done o so selfishly”, he emerges from the darkness to “put up a flare for the seekers to find”.
A journey through darkness, self-loathing and doubt into the light and salvation, Cheer Up is a personal and musical transitional point into a new today and a new tomorrow. John Blek’s voice has never sounded better; it’s unquestionably his finest work yet.
Cheer Up (6th September 2024) Bigger River Recording Co.
Pre-Save here: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/johnblek/cheer-up
John Blek Tour Dates
Tickets: https://www.bandsintown.com/a/322618-john-blek
20/9 Loves, Weston-Super-Mare
21/9 Medina Bookshop, Isle of Wight
22/9 Cafe No. 9, Sheffield
23/9 The Lightship, Blyth
24/9 The Pickering Book Tree, Pickering
25/9 St. Lawrence’s Church, Biddulph
26/9 The Green Note, London
27/9 Bluestone Brewery, Newport
28/9 Thimblemill Library, Smethwick
29/9 Tabernacle, St. David’s
More: https://johnblek.com/
