Martyn Joseph – Here Come The Young
Pipe Records – 25 January 2019
For Martyn Joseph’s 33rd studio album, he teams up with producer Gerry Diver who also lends a hand in playing many instruments throughout Here Come The Young. There’s no denying the fire and energy that fuel the songs and delivery on which he addresses the uncertainty and the hope for change on both political and personal levels.
It opens with the title track which recently premiered on Folk Radio UK. It’s a measuredly urgent, atmospheric, fiddle-bolstered number written in the wake of the 2017 election and the impact of the youth vote, but also inspired by the youth movement in Florida seeking to tighten gun control laws. It’s a ‘we’re not gonna take it’ list lyric number imbued with optimism in the power of young voters and activists who “tired of their future being taken from them” represent the possibility of making a difference and provides a powerful opening statement.
By contrast, the mid-tempo strummed march beat Oh My Soul addresses self-doubt, percussive waves and Diver’s fiddle punctuating a determination to get past the voices from the past that hold you back and put them in context and perspective as you move forward. A similar theme informs the friskier fingerpicked and scampering rhythm of Get Back To You, seeking to look beyond the negativity of today’s news and draw on the passions and ideals that first drive you to bring about change, in yourself and the world around you.
For want of a better metaphor, it’s love that charts the path, and which provides the strength to withstand the trials and tribulations that might otherwise shake your faith, embodied here in the gentle Loves Majority which speaks of how the collective good will always outweigh the bad.
Things get bluesy for This Glass, a rumbling hymn to those, the “givers and the sharers” who see things as half full rather than half empty, featuring Diver on 12-string slide and Pete Flood (Bellowhead) holding down the loping drums.
The musical mood switches again with Driving Her Back To London, an intimately played and breathily sung mood piece number documenting a car journey, driving his daughter back to university in London, swapping tunes on their iPhones (“she plays me Beach House, I play her Blur”) that serves to reflect on the vulnerability, joy, fear and pride in being a parent.
It’s back to the bigger picture for the circling tenor guitar notes of the sultry atmospherics of Communion, a rousing chorus-friendly call to pick yourself up out of the ashes and debris and “bring it back to life again”.
From the panoramic view to the tightly focused, Take Back The Sky, featuring Diver on mandolin, is dedicated to the memory of Razan al-Najjar, a 21-year-old Red Cross nurse on the West Bank in Palestine who was killed by an Israeli sniper while tending unarmed protestors, the inspirational lyric also informed by the image of young children flying kites as a symbol of freedom.
Built around piano and featuring Jonathan Hennessey-Brown on cello, Nothing Is Lost In Love addresses various degrees of tragedy, from 911 to his father’s succumbing to Alzheimer’s, but with a swelling chorus (“nothing is lost in love that can’t be saved”) steeped in positivity that nothing is in vain and that the sun will always push back the darkness.
Unusually, Summer Has A Way is a simple and spare piano ballad, again coloured by cello, a love song to his wife and her ability to raise his spirits “when I’m stranded in the shadows.”
Featuring daughter Harriet on harmonies, the album ends with Collateral, a classic Joseph number which, with its rumbling percussive swells, serves as an anthemic encouragement to rise above the doubts and knock-backs, to acknowledge the cruel that undercuts the comfortable but, ultimately, to draw hope from “the desperate call of the heart” and the pursuit of the endless search to move beyond doubts as he sings “give us this day just a little tremor/The smallest glimpse, that crack of light” that will guide us “beyond anywhere we know.”
As he notes, the songs go to “a few tough places”, but ultimately, he leaves you with the hope that, whether it’s the idealistic young with their newly forged passion or the old campaigners still carrying the flag, there are those out there who will not go gently into the darkness while they can still kindle a flame to their torch.
For details of all Martyn’s upcoming shows visit: http://www.martynjoseph.net/upcoming-shows/