Joshua James has one of those rare, arresting voices
that somehow sneaks up on you with its vulnerability and hushed prettiness
while also consuming your attention with its earnestness. That is, of course,
if you’re the sort who is predisposed to hang on every word of singer-songwriter
and folk musician who pours himself and his worldview into his art. That James
and his bandmates weave together ethereal and eerily serene musical backdrops
for that voice and James’s simultaneously stark and sweet-natured lyrics only
tightens his songs’ impressive hold on you the more you live with them.
His music has had that effect on me ever since the
first time I pressed play on “Coal War” back in 2009, after taking a chance by
purchasing Build Me This at my favorite
local record store without hearing a note of his music or knowing anything
about James other than being entranced by that austere gothic Americana album
art. It’s a record I fell in love with and listened to front to back for years,
providing the soundtrack for multiple solo road trips crossing multiple state
lines, including several songs on nearly every mixtape I passed on to friends.
It’s an album I still keep coming back to, sometimes after a year or so absence
and inspired to hear it fresh after having it pulled to the forefront of my
mind by some whim or song I come across, and it holds up beautifully. So does
anything Joshua James has made in the interim years: From the Top of Willamette Mountain, the Beware EP and his exquisitely crafted album of Modest Mouse covers,
Well, Then, I’ll Go to Hell.
That makes it all the more of a pleasure to report
that his new album, My Spirit Sister, not only holds up alongside everything
that has come before, but it may even transcend those quietly excellent
releases. It is a streamlined collection of ten songs etched in utter intimacy
while conjuring up grand expanses. James’s music always carries a mystical wind
with a modest, Western spirit, fitting with his Utah roots and fondness for
mountains, animals and nature imagery in his lyrics. Now, his songs, as
evocative as ever in their poetry, are more dynamic and arranged and produced
with such precision that they feel as fully alive as the landscapes he
treks. They rustle and build to roars, and they crackle and smolder on their
way to organic choruses that nestle in your head. Songs like “Broken Tongue,” “Golden
Bird,” “Backbone Bend,” and “Losin’ Mi Mente” thrive on James’s guileless
introspection and seem to inhabit some enchanting plane between prayer and
ghost story. These are pensive songs of solitude, wayward wonder, tenuous
romance, and lovelorn optimism, but the dances between valleys and peaks make
the whole work a consistent joy to behold. From the gorgeous, emotionally
complex ode to his newborn daughter, “Millie,” to the confessional two-punch
masterwork of “Dark Cloud” and “Blackbird Sorrow” to close the album, Joshua
James crafts songs of love and one’s relationship to self, lovers and
surroundings in search of indelible truths and self-actualization measured against
the passing of time.
Always with an understanding of mortality while
finding poetry in what’s in front of him and beyond his reach, he keeps making pure,
poignant songs full of buoyant, red-blooded spirit even if occasionally
burdened with a heavy heart. For the uninitiated, maybe imagine some
intersection of a huskier-voiced Elliott Smith’s fragile melancholy and
melodies, starkly Western-gazing folk of Springsteen’s Nebraska, the lush, soaring harmonies and hooks of Fleet Foxes, and
a comparable thematic core to Raymond Carver stories. It all amounts to a sterling album that feels so deceptively effortless it’s tempting to think
Joshua James was born to make it, but rest assured he had to go through more
than a little hell and had to find beauty in all the hardship to do so.
My Spirit Sister was self-released by Joshua James and is out now (released April 7, 2017).
Find it here.
