back to reviews www.mescalina.it (IT) 040324 ORIGINAL TEXT IN ITALIAN THOMAS DENVER JONSSON & THE SEPTEMBER SUNRISE: Hope to her [CD] Articolo di: Christian Verzeletti Thomas Denver Jonnson is a young Swedish songwriter, who has released his debut toward the end of 2003. Yet calling him "debuter" or "emergent" might not be suitable and diminish his skills. Everything Thomas is not an unexperienced person: he already played a good batch of concerts in the North Europe. Besides he is proving to have a fecundity of a good author: "Hope to her" has already been followed by an Ep ("Then I kissed her softly") and a mini-album ("The never heard her sing)". More than the favorable reviews from the European and American press, these proves his goodness. Thomas Denver is not a star but a sincere songwriter. And "Hope to her" is the humble demonstration of it. His ballads look at the United States without exalting, without thinking great, above all without going out of the intimacy of his own introspection. Thomas has a low voice and, with intelligence and coherence, doesn't use it to try to hit: his sound doesn't pretend impact or involvement, rather asks for attention and concentration. Accomplices the Septembers Sunrise, he doesn't hide the affiliation to a certain rock of the American province, from the Uncle Tupelo, to Jay Farrar and Neal Casal. And also when he recalls the soul of Springsteen, it is for gathering his humblest atmospheres, on the border among "The promised land" and "The ghost of Tom Joad." It is like this way for the parts of harmonica, even if then Thomas songs like to watch inside their own: it is as if the author had consumed "Darkness on the edge of town" or certain disks by Neil Young, but then had enough conscience to recognize his own limits and to avoid following the same epic. The merit of "Hope to her" it is not to sound like anybody, also even playing Americana to all the effects. The low voice of Thomas stirs in unison with the echos of the steel: the landscape that derives is not the usual american open space, but a flat moor, apparently immovable and molt, proper of the northern countries. They are the small details, a hidden accordion, a second voice, that change the light of the whole picture, as a breeze that crosses an extended earth to loss of eye. His is not a cold, but thin writing, in equilibrium between the scannings of the American rock and the humor of the European songwriting. Songs like "Long life to lose" and "Shades of green", or as "Come on up" and "Jeanna", they don't have anything of enormous, but they are to appreciate really for this, revealing their small arrangimentis step by step. "Hope to her" it is not a disk of great crescendos or great promises of rock: it leaves "only" a small hope, lasting to the following listening.