For those of you unfamiliar with José González, let me introduce you. You’re in a room, and there’s a man there with a guitar and a voice. José González is a trilingual guitarist who specializes in gentleness. His strums and finger-plucks lull and hypnotize beneath the wash of his sometimes-English, sometimes-Spanish, and sometimes-Swedish wordplay.
His newest album, Against the Dying of the Light is a continuation of his signature style with a touch of desert blues, drawing inspiration from Saharan African groups like Tinariwen. His music could be played while journaling as the sun goes down, or when sharing candles, wine, and laughter at the dinner table. However, a closer look at the lyrics and poetry takes a critical look at the human relationship with nature and technology.
The album opens up with “A Perfect Storm,” which has meditative chanting and brings you in with the familiar sounds you’ve come to expect from José. González sprinkles his three languages over the album with lots of beautiful “Ooos and Ahhs”. These foreign languages have that quality of washing over you to remind us that words are only sounds.
And while the feel of the music is relaxing, if you are a lyric-junkie and want to dive into the poetry of it all, González offers up a dish of growing concern for the state of humanity. “Etyd” gets into themes of a fool’s hope and how ignorance can turn us into naive children. “For Every Dusk” digs into the rotten core of apathy. And “Sheet” reminds us to let go, not know, and grow up.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. My favorite song on the album is called “You and We.” When listening through the album several times, this one always perked up in my eardrums. And the lyric “I wish you well” felt good in my heart. What a lovely thought to share with someone you know.
Many of the tracks have a clear feeling of human hands: the sound of fingers sliding up and down the neck of the guitar. The imperfect plucks and pats make the music sound better, more real, more lived in. You can hear his breath, the sound of his heels keeping rhythm with the floor. It is all so unequivocally human.
The final song on the track “Joy (Can’t Help But Sing)” leaves us with a feeling of hope. González posits that when we are enraptured with the beauty of life, “the fruit begin to sing” and we can’t help but sing along too.
José González will take on a global tour to coincide with the release of Against the Dying of the Light, which will be released everywhere this Friday, March 27th. Listen to the pre-released songs here.
The Indy Review 