HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER : JUMP FOR JOY

HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER : JUMP FOR JOY

20 Years And A Nickel
Alice
I Saw The New Day In The World
Shinbone
Little Pink Church
Jesus Is Bored
Nu-Grape
Feeling Eternal
Jump For Joy
The Wondering
Palo Santo / Cloud Mesa
California King
My Old Friends
Sunset On The Faders

Label : Merge Records

Release Date : August 25, 2023

Length : 39:48

Review (Pitchfork) : M.C. Taylor is no stranger to alter egos. It could be argued that Hiss Golden Messenger, the name of the loose collective he’s fronted since 2008, is a nom de plume itself. Cloaking his fears and dreams within the confines of the project gives Taylor enough remove from his introspection to get up on stage, a dynamic that's compounded on Jump for Joy. Stepping somewhat outside of himself, Taylor invented the semi-autobiographical character of Michael Crow, an adolescent who soaks up everything the world has to offer and pours it all into his music. The songs that constitute Jump for Joy are either written from Crow'’ perspective or in dialogue with Taylor’s older, wiser narrator. If this all sounds convoluted, a sentiment Taylor winkingly underscores by opening the album by singing “There’s no such thing as a simple song,” Jump for Joy doesn’t sound complicated. That’s a deliberate decision. Jump for Joy belongs to an emerging class of albums by artists who’ve chosen to embrace positivity after suffering through the pandemic. This wasn’t a straight line for Taylor. He spent most of his previous record, 2021’s Quietly Blowing It, on a voyage inward, reacting to the onset of COVID-19 with an atypical melancholy that he sought to temper with a stronger sense of soulful rhythm. Jump for Joy picks up on that thread, pushing beats and grooves to the forefront and moving Taylor’s coded confessions to the back burner. Listening to the album without the aid of a lyric sheet, it’d be difficult to discern the concept; the lyrics support the sound and not the other way around. Hiss Golden Messenger always has traded in ambience, incorporating brief bridges of sound between tracks. To a lesser extent, they have also been groove merchants—the band’s 2009 debut, Country Hai East Cotton, had a swampy little number called “Boogie Boogie.” The difference here is that a lot of Jump for Joy actually does boogie and does so proudly. Take the title track: With its limber New Orleans polyrhythms, it’s a loving salute to jam-rock legends Little Feat. “Jump for Joy” has clear cousins in the thick funk of “Nu-Grape” and “California King,” a blissed-out number whose guitars burble like the Grateful Dead's on “Sugar Magnolia.” Neither song should be interpreted as Taylor reinventing Hiss Golden Messenger as a jam band, though; he’s working once again with bassist Alex Bingham and guitarist Chris Boerner, adding drummer Nick Falk and pianist Sam Fribush to the mix, a group that’s too focused on individual songs to plunge into the deep waters of improvisation. Rather, the loping rhythms are part of the positivity Jump for Joy exudes, a sensibility that also surfaces in the chilled out shimmer of “Jesus Is Bored” and “Shinbone,” a pop number that sounds like a yacht rock relic, glistening with synths and riding a mellow groove. All the slickness on Jump for Joy can be beguiling. It’s an album that feels less like a roving party than a backyard BBQ, and the music seems designed to fade pleasingly into its surroundings. Such an anodyne approach has its appeal yet it’s strange that a record from a singer/songwriter as ambitious as M.C. Taylor equates optimism with simplicity. His notion of rekindling his initial music-making spark by writing from the stance of a teenager leads him down a path where he punctuates aphorisms like “I saw the new day in the world” with such evocative imagery as “There’s a tangerine moon over Texas, ripe enough to feel it dripping.” Here, it’s possible to hear the tension between Taylor’s craftsmanship and creative conceit; it can occasionally feel as if he’s purposely muting his colorful verbiage. Then again, those open-ended, vaguely corny affirmations match the sunniness of Jump for Joy. They’re the sentiments that suit the smooth sounds he’s laying down.

Review (The Guardian) : Creating a narrator through which autobiographical stories can be told is a well-established literary device, and it’s one that MC Taylor, leader of North Carolina five-piece Hiss Golden Messenger, deploys to good effect on his latest album of superior Americana. As “Michael Crow”, Taylor tells stories from different eras of his life, some real, some imagined: as a teenager, as a struggling musician trying to make it (20 Years and a Nickel), as a father. Less reliably, as a stonemason on Nu-Grape. Throughout, there’s a beguiling sense of wide-eyed wonder, best illustrated by Shinbone’s opening line: “Woke up this morning, my God I felt happy.” It makes for an aptly titled record. Taylor’s tightly marshalled bandmates play their part, too: theirs is a warm distillation of country-soul and folk, with subtle funk undertones. On the standout Feeling Eternal, there’s even a distinct resemblance to the War on Drugs’ motorik relentlessness. In a world of diminishing returns, not many artists hit their peak 11 (or so) albums into their career. That only makes Jump for Joy even more of a triumph.

Review (Mojo) : Singer-songwriters are not, as a breed, averse to mythologising their creative struggles. As careers stretch on, but effective ways of monetising a music-making life diminish, a lot of energy can be expended on grappling with the muse, and the business, and sometimes both at once. The latest album by M.C. Taylor and Hiss Golden Messenger – roughly the North Carolina band’s eleventh studio set in a productive 15 years – initially seems to conform to that stereotype. “I’m waiting/Trying to write my masterpiece,” Taylor sings on the opener, 20 Years And A Nickel, “And it’s coming out a riddle.” Jump For Joy, though, is a not an album freighted with self-pity. Rather, it’s shot through with a kind of hard-earned positivity, a radical acceptance. The Hiss Golden Messenger catalogue is a remarkably consistent one, which tacitly rejects the whole concept of one-off masterpieces; a body of work which has evolved in subtle and consolatory ways ever since their debut, Country Hai East Cotton, in 2009. Jump For Joy, nevertheless, feels like a significant point in Taylor’s creative journey. The rootsy musical blend – the country-soul and folk rock, the accents of funk, the faintest ghosts of dub, the blood ties to Bob Dylan and Van Morrison – is more seamless than ever. The current band, too, play fantastically, a more stable line-up than previous Hiss iterations whose intuitive skills can be tracked via a clutch of excellent live albums on Bandcamp. What’s new, though, is how Taylor has pushed his music’s most rousing dimensions to the fore. If previous Hiss records generally maintained a fragile balance between his melodically uplifting and lyrically introspective compulsions, 2021’s Quietly Blowing It perhaps drifted a little further to the latter end of the spectrum: very much a product of lockdown anxieties, of spiritual dislocation. Jump For Joy, in contrast, makes its mission statement explicit from the title track down. “Jump for joy/Gimme apocalypse,” Taylor sings, over a loose-but tight New Orleans groove (Sam Fribush on piano in striking Allen Toussaint form). It’s not deranged partying in the face of a world on fire, exactly, more a mature attempt to worry less, to be empowered by what a lifetime of making music has brought him. To hear an artist, who’s sometimes been hobbled by depression, find the mitigated defiance of Feeling Eternal – “For those down and out but still devoted, I’m one of them” – is inspiring enough. But after this rich, bracing record has ended, after Taylor has recruited Levon Helm’s daughter Amy as a backing vocalist, and referenced Dickey Betts as well as the poet Mary Oliver, it’s a line borrowed from Oliver that resonates strongest. “I’m just a nail in the house of the universe,” Taylor sings on Nu-Grape, realistic enough to know his place in the greater scheme of things. Oliver’s qualifier in her original poem, Blue Iris, is omitted, but the implication is crucial: “Tiny but useful.”