It’s been a very long time since a truly new studio album from Matt Johnson dropped, a quarter of a century in fact, if you cast aside esoteric soundtracks, the odd single and spoken word projects. Craig Stephen offers some thoughts on Johnson's 2024 return, Ensoulment ...
The master of a quartet of dark but sublime albums in the 80s
and 90s – namely Soul Mining, Infected, Mind Bomb and Dusk - has a lot to live
up to. But the production of an album in 2024 is a remarkable feat, not merely
given Johnson’s semi-retirement from the music industry, but due to an
emergency throat operation he went under just four years ago. It hasn’t apparently
affected his voice which sounds as ever like the narrator of a teenage thriller
movie and Leonard Cohen with an English accent.
With every The The album there is a mix of the political and
the personal. And Ensoulment is no different. On ‘I Hope You Remember (The Things
I Can’t Forget)’, the protagonist looks back on a time that, while recent,
still seems far in the distant. “The fireplace glow – the coal-tar soap/The
Sunday roast – the tobacco smoke/ The jamboree bags – the penny chews/All now,
disappearing from view.” It has something of a 1984 in song feel about,
as fears surface about how the “machines are here to correct our thoughts” and
how our dreams are now monitored and monetised.
Similarily, Johnson sings, on ‘Some Days I Drink My Coffee By The
Grave of William Blake’, of a lost London which is becoming subsumed by the
charge of modernity. The city, and indeed Albion itself, is now a land where
the greedy are the new gods and the people are ruled by a “dictatorship in
drag” re-shaped by quiet coup d’etats.
There’s a similar thoughtline on ‘Cognitive Dissident’, an
Orwellian nightmare laid bare in song in which the population is now very much
controlled. “Servile, surveilled/Dumbed down, curtailed/Screengrabbed, downranked/Untagged,
debanked.”
And on ‘Kissing the Ring of POTUS’, The The return to a theme
developed on 1986’s Infected, of an America that is a frightening world dominator
and where Britain was described as the 51st state of the USA. Sadly,
for Johnson, little if anything has changed in the global superpower game of
control: “The Empire of Lies secures allies/Like a spider ties up flies/Those
hand-picked parasites ruling the servile satellites/Know
who they dare not
criticise/A psychopathic superpower spies from the
sky/Transmitting viruses into the mind's eye.”
There are also a few tracks exploring Johnson’s other
fascination in life, love and romance. His lustful, depraved voice reminds me
of Tom Waits but is much easier on the ear. It is a tome that is very fitting
for an exploration of modern day romance on ‘Zen & The Art Of Dating’ in
which one of the protagonists goes on a journey from microwave dinners made for
one to “That familiar throb deep inside,” after finding a lover by swiping
right. It is somewhat cringey, with lines that come across as banal and
repetitive but its redeeming feature is that Johnson tells the tale so well
that you are riveted by the journey into whatever it is the two protagonists
after searching for, be that a long-term romance or a casual affair.
Ensoulment is performed in a variety of styles – it has
elements of English folk, indie-rock, jazz and a simmering of electronica.
Nothing gets out of hand, it doesn’t develop into the sort of stirring pop that
was the signature tune of, say, the single ‘Heartland’ or the ‘Beat(en)
Generation’. It is, not, on the other hand, a yawning descent into MOR
banality. The mood is right in the middle. That’s somewhat contrary to the
lyrics which, as we have seen, are arresting and challenging.
You get the sense that Johnson is at home with his band, who are
both engaging in their playing manner and allowing the singer’s talent to shine.
A case therefore of welcome back, and a demand that Ensoulment
can be a spur to more material without such long gaps in between.
