Timezone 2026
Eulogizing the family cat to tell arresting, if dour, instrumental stories of domestic bliss and other issues, German troubadour opens into his personal space for all to see.
Interim
Although there’s no deficit of guitar virtuosi on the scene, just a few of such musicians are able to imbue their detailed delivery with emotions which tug at the listener’s heartstrings in the same way they go about fretboard – but Jeff Aug can do this and more. Three decades after the American-bred artist claimed his stake on the acoustic-lace terrain by sharing “The Last Enlightening Moment Before Sleep Prevails” and two years after "Kiss Of The Liquid Moon" signaled his return to fingerstyle approach, the Immenstadt master has come back from fantasy reaches to access most intimate aspects of life. “Interim” might be short, the twelve-track album’s title suggesting a stopgap release rather than a consummate offering, yet its half-hour is brimming with brutal, albeit exquisitely expressed, honesty – and that’s something, given vocals don’t dwell here, unlike pure passion driving the dozen numbers to celestial purity and simultaneously tethering everything down to earth.
The record may begin inconspicuously, as “New Day’s Dawn” projects its folk-influenced strum in a light bucolic manner before passages performed by Aug and his teenage son Oskar Tauber reveal fresh energetic nuances, with a slight blues tinge to their melodic curlicues, but “Timeline” introduces intense baroque austerity to the flow, and “Hangover” stumbles, quite deliberately, for a mere minute, to land a blow on the audience’s senses. However, the tripartite titular cut- whose chapters (which, in writer’s words, represent three points on a personal musical spectrum) are scattered throughout the platter – seems to follow this pattern only to defy expectations by adding different instrumental elements to its palette. While the suite’s first installment, subtitled “The Day The Elephant Died” and reaching for resonant depths, bristles with electric riffs and wails, the increasingly fiery “Interim II” rides a simmering organ, and the last one, also known as “Point Of No Return” and placed second in the sequence, proves to be playful enough to induce the desire to dance in the artist’s concert crowd.
Still, there’s brisk elegance to “Ernesto” that reflects the nature of Aug’s cat it’s dedicated to, and tenderness to the ripples of “Emeralds” that constantly shifts its tempo, whereas “Open Fields” unfolds into an enchanting, echoey panorama of epic scope which will challenge the track’s brevity. But if the impressively gentle “Suspended Joy” feels a bit restrained on emotional front, “Serenade” features a violin to focus Aug’s talents as a classical composer on affairs of the heart, and “Aaron’s Song” brings things to a close with elegiac simplicity.
A monumentally transparent masterpiece, “Interim” must be studied as well as enjoyed.
*****
