Jet Johnson resolve the beauty debate

Revisionism is rife and taking further steps to falsify everything, from Americans winning all the wars since Hitler, single-handedly according to Hollywood, to pop music merely being another product on the shopping malls’ inventory. Iraqi perversion continues shamelessly but lip-locking of Madonna and her disciples Britney and Christina had more media coverage…

Time-honoured truths are prostituted and old wisdoms are re-configured and turned upside down: “Every picture tells a lie” at the Adobe age; “Beauty is in the eye of ad-agencies” and “Television is mother of all studying”… Welcome to the deflating history but there is an escape route, provided by artists and groups who believe that there is a salvation and pop music should be more than a parade of pretty faces, tomorrow’s fashion and choreography to match but song-be-damned!

Let me (re) introduce you to Jet Johnson, an international trio based in London: on vocal and bass, Carline Nesbo (native of Norway), guitarist Gavin Baker (Somerset) and drummer Kevin Smith (a Brit, also). The trio offers us their debut disc, ‘Micropolitan’, that is brimming with 11 three-minute pop songsmithery that is such a mingle of different elements, mixture of styles, free of rules that govern commercial output that you are taken back to the days when quality was considered a virtue.

Emerging with subtle, understated tones of opening tracks – ‘November’, title cut – their summertime single ‘Donnie’ picks up the pace and there is no excuse that so much crap kept it off the charts. It is a jovial, ethereal, lush and charming ditty that brings to mind elegance of a 1960s chanteuse over a totally modern sound. Jet Johnson’s musical approach is truly idiosyncratic and so many other elements find place in its expending vocabulary: jazz, minimalism, acoustic, experimental, reggae, dancey, oriental, atmo, even country-ish…

Over a pastoral, often spartan backing, a fragile vocal that is oh-so-sexy (not heard since the Young Marble Giants days of early 1980s, methinks), sonically as pure as first love, emo-connecting and providing a sanctuary for all the culturally shell-shocked souls. Ms Nesbo leads JJ and us into another temporal zone, conjuring up hidden forces that support regimes that dictate order of our reality. This band has the power to lift one above the pettiness of decaying urbanity.

Jet Johnson’s album is like a jam-round-dinner-table by The Mamas And Papas, Prefab Sprout and Red Crayola members producing a range of tracks, from a jiggy ‘Something Impossible’ with strange break that grows into a journey to a mushrooming epic, Joy Division-esque ‘’Great Supper’, the disrobing gorgeousness of ‘Beautiful’, to the country-powdered ‘Cats In Heaven’.

Before we stamp a value ask yourself just what it is you are enjoying and find entertaining? What does it say about your attitudes to art, music, world and life? Don’t let your judgement be ultimately formed by some faceless propagandist, talking heads or spin-docs. No one can be held responsible but each ‘number one’… That’s why it is ‘Micropolitan’.

8/10