Such an anodyne approach has its appeal yet it’s strange that a record from a singer/songwriter as ambitious as M.C. It’s an album that feels less like a roving party than a backyard BBQ, and the music seems designed to fade pleasingly into its surroundings. Rather, the loping rhythms are part of the positivity Jump for Joy exudes, a sensibility that also surfaces in the chilled out shimmer of “Jesus Is Bored” and “Shinbone,” a pop number that sounds like a yacht rock relic, glistening with synths and riding a mellow groove.Īll the slickness on Jump for Joy can be beguiling. “Jump for Joy” has clear cousins in the thick funk of “Nu-Grape” and “California King,” a blissed-out number whose guitars burble like the Grateful Dead's on “Sugar Magnolia.” Neither song should be interpreted as Taylor reinventing Hiss Golden Messenger as a jam band, though he’s working once again with bassist Alex Bingham and guitarist Chris Boerner, adding drummer Nick Falk and pianist Sam Fribush to the mix, a group that’s too focused on individual songs to plunge into the deep waters of improvisation. Take the title track: With its limber New Orleans polyrhythms, it’s a loving salute to jam-rock legends Little Feat. To a lesser extent, they have also been groove merchants-the band’s 2009 debut, Country Hai East Cotton, had a swampy little number called “Boogie Boogie.” The difference here is that a lot of Jump for Joy actually does boogie and does so proudly. Hiss Golden Messenger always has traded in ambience, incorporating brief bridges of sound between tracks. Listening to the album without the aid of a lyric sheet, it’d be difficult to discern the concept the lyrics support the sound and not the other way around. Jump for Joy picks up on that thread, pushing beats and grooves to the forefront and moving Taylor’s coded confessions to the back burner. He spent most of his previous record, 2021’s Quietly Blowing It, on a voyage inward, reacting to the onset of COVID-19 with an atypical melancholy that he sought to temper with a stronger sense of soulful rhythm. Jump for Joy belongs to an emerging class of albums by artists who’ve chosen to embrace positivity after suffering through the pandemic. If this all sounds convoluted, a sentiment Taylor winkingly underscores by opening the album by singing “There’s no such thing as a simple song,” Jump for Joy doesn’t sound complicated.
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