thomas denver jonsson
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.