Gentle Spirit

Album review

Gentle Spirit is the Bella Union debut of California-based singer, songwriter, and producer Jonathan Wilson (ex-Muscadine). The all-analog sound of Gentle Spirit unabashedly reflects the blanketing influence of Laurel and Topanga Canyon's singer/songwriter and country-rock eras during the 1970s -- as does its double-LP-length, 78-minute runtime. It's loose, relaxed, sounds like its participants were completely baked, and is filled with tasty instrumental and vocal asides and guest spots. In essence, it's an aspirational cousin to David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name on one side, and Gene Clark's No Other on the other side. Wilson's revolving studio cast includes appearances by Vetiver's Andy Cabic, Chris Robinson, veteran bassist Gerald Johnson (Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Sugarcubes, Pointer Sisters, et al.), keyboardist Adam MacDougall (Black Crowes), and others. Wilson plays guitars, keys, mandolins, basses, and other instruments. His songwriting reflects incessant desires for goodwill, inner peace, generosity, compassion, etc. That said, he knows that his protagonist struggles to find peace in a world where everything was supposedly born from love.
"Can We Really Party Today?" borrows its acoustic guitar intro from Neil Young's "Tell Me Why" before ushering in a sweet, tender lyric that directly addresses willful ignorance and hedonism in a world filled with trouble. The only other instruments are a cello and a piano that flow in with a lilt during the final third. "Desert Raven" is a drifting, psychedelic groover with dual lead guitars, strummed acoustics, and jangling electrics atop wafting keys and thudding kick drums and tom-toms. It waxes and wanes along a minor-key progression with trippy guitar breaks, Mellotron strings, and plenty of reverb framing the ghostly vocal. It may be the album's finest moment. "Canyon in the Rain" offers blissed-out, intimate psychedelia with a bassline taken directly from the Beatles' "Sun King," while the balance recalls the early acoustic, hippy era of Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Not all of Wilson's psych experiments bear fruit, however: "Natural Rhapsody" has so many parts and such an open, formless structure, it feels unfinished. The ten-and-a-half-minute closer "Valley of the Silver Moon" is so plodding and spectral it sounds like the band was still rehearsing as it was being recorded. Before that, however, the final half of the record contains some real gems. The cover of Gordon Lightfoot's "The Way I Feel" is a choogling organ and guitar groover, while "Rolling Universe" melds Americana, medieval folk, and shimmering acoustic pop amid lyrics that balance the earthly with the cosmic. Despite its massive length, Gentle Spirit lives up to its title; it's an easy, breezy, endearing listen with plenty of seductive earworms to draw the listener down a sonic rabbit hole and into another world temporarily.

© Thom Jurek /TiVo