Tessa Rose Jackson: The Lighthouse Review – Grief, Grace, and Memory in the Birth of a Lighthouse Folk | Popular music

TThe warm sounds of folk guitar provide the roots for Tessa Rose Jackson’s debut album under her name, traveling through time from Bert Jansch to REM to Sharon Van Etten in every strum and squeak. Previously recording as Somebody, the Dutch-British musician has made three albums in the shadows of pop, but her fourth album – a grittier, grittier affair, produced alone in rural France – digs into ancestry, mortality and memory.

The lighthouse begins with its main path. Perfect fifths, low groans of woodwinds, and a thunderous clatter of percussion frame a journey toward a lighthouse on “the high tide on a lonely wind.” The death of one of Jackson’s mothers when she was a teenager underscores her lyrics here and elsewhere: on “The Bricks That Make the Building,” a folk-psych gem that meditates on “the earth that nourishes the garden/the breath that helps a child sing,” and on “Gentle Now,” which begins with soft clouds of birdsong, then addresses how aging can soften the grieving process. Her approach to the subject is inquisitive, poetic and refreshing.

Poppier’s production floats the energetic edges of this album. Fear Bangs the Drum and Wild Geese play like confident cousins ​​to singles by This Is the Kit or Aldous Harding, while Built to Collide, driven by rhythmic violin shivers and fast drums, is radio catnip. Jackson’s voice, confident but never arrogant, is also captivating, oscillating between tenderness and soulful expression. It’s most effective on simpler songs like the piano-led Grace Notes, the final track of Pricefighter, and the beautiful By Morning, which is driven by an opening guitar melody that arrives like a Paul Simon classic. It is a luminous rebirth.

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Produced by Philip Weinraub (Big Thief, Adrianne Lenker), this is the Irish folk band’s fourth studio album You bumsall tied together (River Lea), pulsing with moving, slow-burning songs. Arrested characters repeatedly emerge from the fog, such as “troubled teenagers and drag queens” in On Sitric Road, young people “swimming in a river of smoke and serotonin” in The Flood, and “gray-eyed” Mary in Mayfly, who smiled when she didn’t think she was being watched, “as if she had nothing left to hide.” Adam Wickert“To Whom We Owe Ourselves” (self-released) is a gritty, raucous exploration of traditional songs: “Goodbye Green Man” relishes a drilled chanter and Thai gongs, while Greensleeves are transported to barren, eerie landscapes on a musical saw. If you want to push the limits even more brutally, Bedouin war machine and Susan AlcornContra Madre (self-released) thrillingly blends the late pedal steel player’s talents with death metal.