Jann Klose 2026
Globetrotting storyteller embraces album conceptuality to escape temporal snares and come up trumps.
The Future Trap
Taking an audience on a trip has been one of Jann Klose’s strongest suits for three decades, yet whereas such records as 2008’s "Reverie" or "Surrender" from 2023 offered a sweet getaway from quotidian routines, his clever pop songs rarely aspired to anything bigger than a melodic study of human flaws and fortes. At first glance, “The Future Trap” seems no different from its predecessors – until its pieces fall together, and what the artist used to call mosaic gels into a travelogue of sorts, a journey of self-discovery, a trip through time undertaken by someone who’s not exactly Jann, but is close enough to Klose to let him believably inhabit the sonic psyche of this character. Opting for a rock opera wasn’t part of his brief, though, despite the presence of a few prominent guests and the division of the platter’s numbers into two acts bookended by intro and outro, respectively setting the theme and forming a sentimental finale fortified with a tremulous acoustic take on a certain Tim Buckley classic, a perfect bonus to a serious opus.
Once the guise of initial intimacy is discarded in favor of “Show Me Who You Are,” which struts its effervescent funk with plenty of gusto and sees Everett Bradley underpin Jann’s vocal acrobatics, there’s no going back – as the listener should expect from a record about the one-way run of life – and grooves begin to reign supreme to render the tunes vivid and infectious. That’s why “When I’m With You” so impressively marries retro new wave to Klose’s natural soulfulness, and “How Do I Get What I Need” so intrepidly moves into reflective gloom before kicking an energetic refrain up to a glitterball to clear the floor for “Better Liar,” whose folk motifs purify the album’s flow. The sheer brilliance and allure of what the warbler and the platter’s producer and principal instrumentalist Marcus Dembinski concocted are revealed on the electronica-tinctured, fittingly retrofuturistic “Love Is A Verb,” which features Cape Town’s DJ Cosher and bristles with brass and bass in all the right places, and segues into the wordless “Conjugation,” which adds Alphonso Horne’s adventurous horn to the heady brew on display.
Still, nothing can prepare an aural spectator for the sublime balladry of “The Lost Kingdom” that Jann cowrote with Annie Haslam and shared with Rachel Flowers to lift the serenade’s poetic lines to celestial heights embroidered with the latter lady’s piano, while the scintillating interlude of “Vignette” cleanses the palate with its six-string lace and allows “I Have A Scar” to grow from an a cappella acceptance to a jazz-tinged defiance. But if the vibrant titular track unfolds into an atmospheric vista and rolls over percussive bends towards an ever-elusive horizon of optimism, through “Break The Cycle,” which wraps it in mirage-like effects and spikes it with ivories, the airily warm “Hurting Nobody” finds Klose in the cooing, albeit spiritual, company of Marcella Detroit, and “Over And Over” worms its way, abetted by soft riffs, into everybody’s mind to linger long after the album has dissolved into silence.
Jann Klose’s magnum opus, “The Future Trap” may open a new chapter in his endeavors.
*****
