Jonathan Meur: Woodnotes EP Review
PUBLISHED May 23rd, 2013 02:46 am | UPDATED January 21st, 2016 07:08 am
- Islands
- Strangers In Motion
- Calling Wounds
- Telegram
- Somone’s
- I Carry Your Heart
- Stars (So Be It)
Jonathan Meur’s EP has been awaited with bated breath. For over the past year, those who have watched him grow in confidence and stature in the open mic circuit (notably at Originals Only Open Mic – OOOM) and at bigger venues like Esplanade must have wondered what his songs would sound like with a fuller instrumentation. People have noted the genteelness of his persona and the rawness of his performances but they will remember the poetry he weaved around them in his songs. And so it is, with eagerness, that I take to Woodnotes.
You sense that Woodnotes was conjured up in moments of solitude, in the moments that go unnoticed in the humdrum. For example, Strangers In Motion (my favourite track), the 2nd track on the album, is about that fleeting shade on a bus ride when chemistry is found in the confluence of strangers’ eyes. Telegram is an inventive piece of writing that brings to mind the tapping moments of a telegram being sent. Stars (So Be It) is a poetical expression of the wonderings that occur at night under the watchful metaphor of stars, somewhat fatalistic in its lyricism. But that’s what you get with Jonathan Meur – a lyricist with an innate sense of weaving poetry into song (Someone’s, the fifth track, is a good example of that).
The choice of instrumentation adds a warmth to the songs that might not necessarily have come through in his solo gigs thus far, whether it’s the denseness of the cello or the choral vocals and horns lending some levity to the record. The overall delivery and production still feels a little raw, as if you sense an artist still fumbling for a resolve, an identity, in crafting his own sound. Listening to the title track, Islands, you feel he agrees – ‘watch me prove what I can do,’ and it makes you excited for the things to come.
