Jon McKiel's life and music changed forever when he bought a haunted reel to reel. When the equipment arrived at his home in rural New Brunswick, the singer-songwriter discovered a cassette tape still wrapped in the machine, full of odd bits of songs and guitar noodlings recorded by its previous owner. who was he When did he make these recordings? What dreams did he have for his music? No one could tell. McKiel and his co-producer Jay Crocker (better known as JOYFULTALK) dubbed the then-unknown artist Bobby Joe Hope, welcomed him as a full partner and even named the next album after him. The songs of 2020 Bobby Joe Hope sampled snippets of his unfinished songs into unusual sound collages that disrupted McKiel's solid, if familiar, guitar rock and inspired him to create new sounds and styles in his repertoire.
Hope does not appear Mesmerize, but the ghost of his ghost remains. McKiel and Crocker have further refined their remixing techniques, only this time they put McKiel himself to the test, assembling his own studio experiments into unusual amalgams of blues, dub, soul, folk, tropicália and more. The songs are necessarily disorienting. their melodies are as tight as the grooves are strange—hypnotic, slightly away from. McKiel and Crocker constantly blur the distinction between live performance and recording manipulation. “String,” which sounds like Paul Simon lost in the Bush of Ghosts, layers crunchy guitar over slightly distorted guitar, their melodic lines weaving together. It's like hearing someone playing along on the stereo in the next room, and in its unusualness the moment is both unsettling and unexpectedly beautiful.
All above Mesmerize it seems both familiar and foreign. The title track piles a distorted and clipped guitar lick on top of a busy bass and a drum that sounds like it's borrowed from a '90s rap sample of a '60s jazz tune, but it's the free sax that tilts the song just off the axis. The strange grandeur of “Everlee” is so recognizable as a Byrds reference that you might be frustrated trying to name the tune. Closer “Memory Screen Pt. 2″ distorts a windswept guitar strum until it almost breaks, then descends into a windswept collage of guitar distortion, disembodied voices, and what might be whaling or static from an EVP mic. Everyone has a different idea, developing voice and guitar to new extremes, yet everything fits together like puzzle pieces.
Spooky as it often sounds, Mesmerize it is primarily concerned with the fate of this world. McKiel's cover of Terry Jacks' (underrated singer-songwriter as well as environmental activist) “Concrete Sea” presents the city as an environment unfit for humans: “Nobody's meant to live here in a sea of concrete.” sings “Everyone, including me, wishes he would be released.” McKiel resents the erasure of wonder, the mundane encroachment of everyday magic—a timely concern now that bands proudly use artificial intelligence to write songs. McKiel finds humanity in a bit of a quandary, and on this strangely moving album he appears as a medium, closely attuned to the unknown and unknowable as he deciphers messages from another plane.
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