People 2013
A pilgrim’s progress from a dream into reality is a personal quest to turn it wonderful and wondrous.
“Come on baby come on over, I wanna give in to you”, invites the protagonist of “Four Leaf Clover”, and this level of la-la-light intimacy signifies a continental shift from this album’s predecessor, 2008’s "Reverie", where Jann Klose’s artful aloofness betrayed his European origin. Since then, Jann’s gained a Mid-Atlantic – or, on the groovy, organ-oiled opener “Make It Better”, even Caribbean – buzz instead of erstwhile chamber air, but retained the elegance of approach. More so, voice acrobatics of Klose’s debut, looming all the more large after his involvement in the “Greetings from Tim Buckley” film, made room for the warm close-up, and a vocalist turned into a singer. Such proximity, though, has a price: it’s impossible to get the full picture of the titular puzzle, so repeated spins are highly rewarding.
There’s sweet immediacy to “Know What’s Right”, which draws the line between matters both personal and polemically political to bare the modern world’s interconnections and hint at the holistic vision that is gradually revealed. It takes a certain heightened state to see it, and not for nothing Klose incites the soaring of “The Kite” over the romantic piano and picking, yet for the most part Jann’s modus operandi is a slow, if bright, burn this time around, so “Long Goodbye” offers the orchestral uplift and Florian Opahle’s guitar flight, while the singer charts his stellar way from the lower register to the crystal skies without ever looking down. Still, “Falling Tears” rocks heavy and infectiously, its sparse bluesy riffs a perfect counterbalance to this alluring voice, an axis for the achingly adorable Cajun dance of “Beautiful One” to swirl around with a fiddle in tow.
“I am puzzled as the newborn child”, signs off Jann Klose with Buckley’s immortal “Song To The Siren”, delivered a cappella, meaning the discovery that lies in his own “Mosaic” is common for all of us, the listener and the artist himself, and is all the greater for it.
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