Retro soul specialist digs into Southern roots.
If you follow the description with which Durand Jones sketches his hometown Hillaryville in the spoken-word interlude “The Place You’d Most Want To Live”, you can imagine it as a wonderful place of new beginnings. Jones tells of a town nestled between the meanders of the Mississippi River, founded by ex-slaves after the Civil War; from the intense green and the vastness of the sugar cane plantations there; and from his grandmother, who understood this idyll as “the place you’d most want to live”.
And so Jones orbits on his solo debut (read: for the first time not with his regular band The Indications) a place from which he once fled due to a lack of prospects – but whose magic never quite let go of him. He does that with the swampy grooves of that rock-induced soul sound, as known from the Alabama Shakes (“Have Mercy On Me”). Sometimes by means of stunning languishing from the highest point of a towering wall of sound (“That Feeling”). And in the title song sometimes in the uplifting call-and-response manner of a gospel, which he transfers into the ethereal in a rarely beautiful way. Glory Hallelujah!