Album Review
Mason Jennings with Jack Johnson – I Love You And Buddha Too
Hmmm. Mason Jennings with Jack Johnson, I am unfamiliar with the former and vaguely familiar with the latter, yet this just sounds like hell. Everything I have ever heard Jack Johnson sing makes me shudder into disrepair. Off the top of my head I cannot think of anyone who embodies such MOR sensibilities such as Jack Johnson.
So in goes the CD, ‘Winners Line Information March 04’ By ‘Readers Digest Association UK’. Hmm, I couldn’t work out which was more appealing. It turned out to be Mason Jennings that was on the CD. Who turns out to be the first signing to Isaac Brock’s record label and recently covering two of Dylan’s most famous tracks on Todd Haynes recent film outing on Dylan ‘I’m Not There’, reasonably impressive credentials. Was I too hasty to judge? I still don’t know. Everything about the song smells like a joke, it stinks of novelty and reeks of buffoonery. Yet amongst the somewhat tripe and almost ridiculous lyrics (He loves you and Buddha too, if you hadn’t guessed. Oh, and Jesus and Krishna et el) is a very simplistic yet somewhat progressive pop number. It almost feels like remix territory, in that it’s not a million miles away from the vocal layering of a Hot Chip outing. There is even a splashing of LCD sound system in there (in the most very basic of circumstances, you must understand). It seems somewhat crazy that this would be realised as a single, it feels like nothing but a B-side from an album of poor B-sides.
I’m sure the song is Shit. But something is niggling at me, like a New York cockroach that just won’t go away, there is something there, something inescapable within the structure. It may just be a great pop song; perhaps Johnson’s involvement has tainted it so much that my ears won’t stand for it regardless. I don’t know? It is without doubt one of the most confusing things I have ever heard; not the song itself of course, the thing is simplicity personified, but the fact that never has such a straight forward song left me without a specific response. This may be what Jennings is all about? But until I found out, I am still left perplexed, baffled, mystified, bamboozled, bewildered, befuddled [Add Synonym here].