Rod Jones
A Sentimental Education (self-released)
As with most solo projects from members of established, one has to make a conscious effort to seperate their music from their day job if they are to be truly realised as something else than ‘him from that band we’ve heard before’.
Rod Jones’ solo offering may have come as a surprise, not being particularly talkative on stage with Idlewild and therefore not really fitting the stereotype of the frustrated musician wanting to take the microphone. His songs don’t suggest someone desperate for a slice of the limelight, being quite intimate and autumnal in their sound and arrangements.
Opener ‘Sing It Alone’ starts with the couplet “I don’t know if these words have meaning/maybe you will decide”. It sets the tone for the album in being quite timid and slightly more direct than we’re used to hearing from previous projects that he’s been involved in.
The album switches between alt. country and folk and on occasion feels confused. ‘Wonderful’ long threatened to be the best song on the album from previous live airings but the guitar solo halfway through feels painfully out of place and Jones’ arrangement of traditional folk song ‘Black Is The Colour’ feels anonymous in its delivery.
That’s not to say that there aren’t flashes of brilliance; ‘Past Passes By’ is a very pretty song indeed and one of the few moments where the frailty is a positive and ‘Broken Flowers’ is relatively ambitious with its sweeping strings and optimism being fairly difficult to not get swept away with.
The album has a few irks such as this but all contain a theme when it comes to the albums big weak point - Rod Jones never sounds as something other than a backing vocalist. The songs arrangements are (usually) highly competant but cry out for a confident, cracked Celtic baritone, and one dare say that this voice should be - gulp - Roddy Woomble.
As cheap a comparison as this may seem, it never takes a huge level of imagination to imagine a lot of the songs as stripped back offerings from ‘My Secret Is My Silence’ which Jones was already involved in. The majority of the songs aren’t far enough of a departure from the day job to stand up in their own right and the vocals aren’t ever really confident or charismatic enough to carry the project off.
Matthew Shaw
