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Jon Mckiel
Hex
You've Changed - 2024
Michael Panontin
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Jon Mckiel's post-psychedelic masterpiece Bobby Joe Hope dropped in April 2020, just as we all sat shell-shocked at the developing pandemic and our newly imposed isolation. It served, I recall writing at the time, as "a gloriously therapeutic tonic, especially in an age of coronavirus-filled newsfeeds and lockdown tension".
Things may have changed a lot since then, but McKiel's music treads much the same path on the follow-up, Hex. For one thing, both records are collaborations with Jay Crocker, which no doubt accounts for their beguiling fusion of seemingly simple, languorous folk and the curious sampled sounds bubbling in the background.
"[Jay] has a sampler and he has this project, JOYFUL TALK," Mckiel explained recently to Vish Khanna on his Kreative Kontrol podcast. "Historically it's been very digitally created and produced music, and so he had that influence on Bobby Joe.... Then we started just taking tape recordings from here - and I have this eight-track tape recorder that I create all my ideas, my music, on - and then I just share tracks with him remotely and then we can sort of work collaboratively at a distance."
That said, the sampling is more subtle on Hex, allowing Mckiel's compositions a little more room to breathe, with varying results. 'Still Life' is a relatively benign tune that skirts atop a sonic underbed of whirling electronics. Ditto for the two lead tracks, 'Hex' and 'String', both of which buttress things with elements of jazz - some swinging sax (by Nicola Miller) on the former and a swell guitar noodle on the latter.
But perhaps the most interesting track here is Mckiel's take on the topical nugget, 'Concrete Sea', Terry Jacks' dystopian cri de coeur on modern life and its turn away from the natural world. It is admittedly a tune from his childhood ("The chorus hook has been in my head for about 25 years") and one that he still relates to. With lyrics like "No one is meant to be / living here in a concrete sea / Everyone, including me / wishes he could be set free", 'Concrete Sea' is already poignant enough. But in Mckiel's hands, it takes a darker turn, with an added gravitas that plunges the listener into the sort of depressive depths once explored by Gene Clark on his early seventies solo albums.
This is impressive stuff. Fans of Bobby Joe Hope will not be disappointed.
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