Already on his last two albums, “Miracle In The Night” (2019) and “Rialto” (2021), John Southworth seemed to have completely switched to night music that radiated great serenity, but also increasingly enigmatic and one seemed a bit mannered. With “When You’re This, This In Love” he pulls back the heavy curtains a bit and sheds light on his vision of the Great American Songbook. But of course there are also these nocturnes here, which the Canadian succeeds like hardly anyone else of his generation. “Heroes Of Eros” is a masterpiece of slow development. Southworth tells his ballad about the price of desire with relish and descends deeper and deeper into the legend of passion.
The line between somnambulistic and boring as a pit is sometimes thin
“Time To Unwind” sounds like Frank Sinatra in the Cabinet of Horrors, “In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning” plus “Blue Velvet”. Southworth shows that he can also be a step happier in “Always On The River”, a daydream in the form of a pop vignette that even his compatriot Ron Sexsmith can’t pull off any more movingly. “Tiny Tim” switches back to lullaby mode, equal parts homage to the character from Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol and the US entertainer of the same name: “Gone but he is not forgotten/ Tiny Tim, the Johnny Rotten/ Of vaudevillian song.”
The compositions do not always live up to the promises of their creator’s sound, which is populated with metaphors and mythological figures. In other words, the line between somnambulistic and boring as a pit is sometimes thin. A few pieces almost come to a standstill in the murmuring performance. But the magical Southworth moments flash through again and again, in the Dylanesque folk-rock hymn “Lone Brave Spirit” or in the elegiac “Vow”, illuminated by organ and strings. Ever since 2014’s Niagara, Southworth has found a way to croon his songs to us from the other side of reality. With this record he shakes hands with us from his parallel universe.
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