John Harrison is a Triangle institution. He plays with The Evil Tenors and North Elementary and shares stages regularly with the area’s finest; you can find his fingerprints everywhere if you look for them. But his most aberrant — and rewarding — work, he saves for his solo act, Jphono1.
Know Your Clouds, to be released on Feb. 5, will be his second full-length under the moniker. It sees him building on the spaced-out cowboy vision of last year’s Living is Easy and finding some winning formulas in the experimentation.
Some of the album’s best cuts aren’t really songs so much as pools of music to sink into, meditative headspaces to get lost in. Tracks like “Forever Right Here,” “Don’t Freak Out” and “Know Your Clouds” are the standouts where Harrison allows himself to really have fun with form.
“Don’t Freak Out” typifies the texture: breezy vocals, layers of calm acoustic strums, plucky string loops, atmospheric phaser patches, elusive synth lines and a trashed guitar lead, all steeped in hazy, fuzzy lo-fi abrasion and tweaked beyond recognition of the components. It’s messy, mesmeric and in Harrison’s hands, somehow, controlled.
But as deft as the music often is, the record does leave something to be desired in terms of pathos. When the layers peel away, the tone mellows out and Harrison starts to croon, as on “Power of the Sun” or “Wolf in my Pocket,” the lyrics tend to wash over the mix without much affect.
Overall, Know Your Clouds isn’t the fully realized and cohesive project that it could be. But it’s probably the best head-nodding electro-acoustic psych-folk head trip you’re going to find.
Dive verdict: ???½
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