We interrupt your regularly scheduled Cure binge to clear out my extensive backlog (seriously, there’s still a MONO record waiting to be reviewed that I bought two years ago). And today, we revisit my friend Jack Senff with a look at These Northwood Blues, his second release under his given name.
His transition from emocore frontman to folk singer already seemed pretty realized with Boy Rex, but Good To Know You went so much further towards stripped, intimate songwriting that Boy Rex felt like indie rock. These Northwood Blues however takes it even further, adding earnest country western flavors into the space once occupied by bouncing lead guitar lines—and with brilliant results.
From the opening spryness of “Wildfire” to the languid drama of the closing title track, These Northwood Blues is filled with songs as clever and earnest as Jack has ever written. The lead single “Another Way” wrestles with the realization that life is made more of small ordinary days than large triumphanto movements, centering on the bittersweetly relatable anthem of its chorus, “Another day I guess I’ll do it / Make up the way and stumble through it / But hard as I try / I can’t shake / The best has passed me by.” That smallness is recontextualized in the following track, “Quiet Love,” wherein those ordinary moments are sanctified by the gentleness of a life shared with his wife.
Despite its understated stillness, there are still sweeping movements of emotion. Small musical markers like a subtle drum fill or a slide guitar lick carry the emotional weight of the cathartic bombast of his earlier emo outfits, though at a less cosmic scale. It’s like the great colliding of atomic particles that we perceive as a static object. Or perhaps that drama comes from the swirling of the rest of the world around the stillness captured across these six tracks.
Whatever it is, these six, quiet tracks carry themselves with the presence of a full-length. Where most EPs are almost dismissable, mere footnotes in their respective discographies, These Northwood Blues feels as significant as anything Jack has ever released: neither a stopgap between LPs nor a collection of leftovers. It just happens to have fewer songs than a traditional release. But God, what songs.