Listening to Jonti’s album on the way home on the train, and it’s as wonderfully quirky, rich and fun as I’d been led to believe. It honestly does feel like you’ve wondered into a warm happy place where the music charms, the vocals are soft and dreamy, and the samples and offbeat additions to the melody add to a delirious sense of joyful repose. It feels like a bright happy splash of colour – yes I know I have just felt a visual image but that is truly what it’s evoking in me – or wandering through a candy store where everything is bright and happy and delicious, and not in a way that makes you feel like you’re going to die from a sugar dose.
What I am particularly enjoying is the sensation of easing gently into the evening, the music’s trills, bleeps and whoops not in the least unsettling but adding to the general ambience of quiet joy. That’s not to say that the album doesn’t have presence or impact. It is certainly no piece of easily discarded New Age fluff, not even close. It’s presence lies simply in it’s rich, warm, bewitchingly original tones that are a million miles from anything else I have heard in quite a while. This is no mean feat in an age where everything feels like a retread and echoes of melodies that have gone before.
Well done Jonti. You are your own man and have made an album that is head and shoulders above so much else out there. Plus it feels like a happy sunshiny day and that makes this tired, stressed out corporate coal face worker very happy indeed.