Evening Hymns, Spirit Guides (Out of This Spark)

WHO

Peterborough folkie Jonas Bonnetta (with help from members of Ohbijou, The D’Urbervilles and others).

DISCOGRAPHY

Farewell To Harmony (Self-released, 2006)
Let’s All Get Happy Together (Self-released, 2007)
Spirit Guides (Out of This Spark, 2009)

IN A NUTSHELL

With Spirit Guides, Jonas Bonnetta (aka Evening Hymns) launches himself from sad bastard music into the realm of near-perfect orchestral folk-pop.

THE STORY

I’m not sure what makes me sadder, the fact that:
a) I haven’t written about Jonas Bonnetta at all in the last three years (exactly three years, bizarrely enough); or
b) according to Hype Machine and Elbo.ws, only one other person has written about him in that time.

That’s actually a trick question. The correct answer would be c) a combination of the two, coupled with the discovery while writing this review that I no longer have a copy of Bonnetta’s last album, the stunning Farewell To Harmony. In fact, all things being equal, I’d probably put a bit more sad emphasis on how mind-boggling it is that no one else had written about Bonnetta, either as a solo artist or in his current collective form as Evening Hymns, between my write-up and ” target=”_blank”>Herohill’s review last month. I mean, I get that extraordinarily deserving artists get overlooked all the time, but (if memory serves me correctly) Farewell To Harmony was an incredible album — certainly one that (I’d have wagered three years ago) would at least garner Bonnetta a solid group of fans.

I suspect that Spirit Guides will make up that gap. After all, with the strength of a label (and a label that’s distributed by Arts & Crafts to boot) behind him, Bonnetta should be able to get his music in front of quite a few more people.

More importantly, though, Spirit Guides is just a much better album. No disrespect intended to Farewell To Harmony, of course, but (again, if memory serves) that album was a fairly narrow glimpse of Bonnetta’s talent. This time around, with the support of friends in Forest City Lovers, Ohbijou, The D’Urbervilles and The Wooden Sky, he’s able to create something much more substantial. “Mountain SOng” illustrates this perfectly: it starts out with just him, but as it builds over the next six minutes, it expands into something that’s gloriously beautiful, culminating in a choral singalong at the end that would make Bruce Peninsula jealous.

The same could be said about much of the rest of the album. “Dead Deer”, for example, has echoes of Hayden, but is lifted into a whole other level by the presence of a full band who are able to compliment Bonnetta’s gritty vocals with equally gritty music. Similarly, “Broken Rifle”, with its lyric of “This broken rifle’s got a bullet with your name on it”, would probably sound like a lost song from Everything I Long For if it were just Bonnetta and his guitar, but with backing drums and piano, the song takes on a jaunty, even upbeat feel.

Of course, for all those great moments, the album still strikes the deepest chord when it’s at its sparsest. Both “Cedars” and “History Books” sound like refugees from Farewell to Harmony, with just Bonnetta and his guitar, but he’s got the ability and the charisma to pull them off perfectly. Of course, it’s a testament to how well the first two-thirds of the album leads its closing third that it’s hard to imagine the album ending any other way. In fact, to really get a sense of how perfectly the album flows, the second-last track, “November 1st 2008, Lakefield, Ontario”, is literally just five minutes of a thunderstorm, and it still manages to be absolutely riveting and to sound like it belongs right in that spot.

To me, that may capture better than anything just how good Spirit Guides is. It’s an album that’s so engaging, its creator is able to veer off into a completely non-musical direction, and you still feel as though it makes perfect sense. I don’t know if it’ll be another three years before I write about Jonas Bonnetta/Evening Hymns again (hopefully not), but even if it is I’d be willing to bet that Spirit Guides is an album I’ll still be listening to in three years’ time.

http://www.iheartmusic.net/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1746-This-weeks-feature-Evening-Hymns.html

Walking out into the brisk, near-freezing air of downtown Toronto, twenty minutes after midnight, I could almost fathom how Evening Hymns could create an album as gorgeously honest and natural as Spirit Guides from this locale. Perhaps this fleeting epiphany was caused by how grateful my lungs were to escape the overdressed heat of the Horseshoe Tavern, or maybe Jonas Bonnetta’s inspiration – although recorded to tape at various stations around the city – was born and nurtured amid the Peterborough lakes where he resides. However it happened, the nine tracks that constitute Spirit Guides act as an enema to the newspaper-caked streetcars and loitering police cruisers that pollute my urban commute, breathing new life into both Toronto’s indie-scene and the oft-predictable singer-songwriter tag.

‘Lanterns’ opens the disc with a lilting acoustic melody, bittersweet yet familiar, which like several of Bonnetta’s compositions is something of a red herring; settling the listener into quaint comforts before taking off to places unknown. The hint of ‘Lanterns’’s ambition can be heard in its soft backing of strings and nocturnal ambience, initially pillowing voice and guitar before sprawling outward into a sleepless highway ode of steady percussion and devastating lyrics, of which Bonnetta clings to tail-ends of words before they slip by. Where that song’s crest of horns and strings subsides, ‘Dead Deer’ laments a deliberate stillness around two lovers; its vocal-delivery and arrangement tiptoeing as if to avoid detection that an electric riff desires, occasionally delivering a one-two punch like flashing headlights. The craving and nostalgia that linger over these tracks is harnessed into the rollicking fireside rebuttal of ‘Broken Rifle’ and the building anticipation of Spirit Guides’ album highlight ‘Mountain Song’. From sparse beginnings, Bonnetta ascends (no pun intended) a massive song-structure of viola and subtle yet dexterous percussion to a peak where strings, electric guitar and a choral of unisex vocals cry out like echoes into ‘Mountain Song’’s deep chasms.

A record full of such arresting moments and versatile arrangements doesn’t come easy, and Evening Hymns enlisted some friends (from notable acts such as the Wooden Sky, D’Urbervilles, and Forest City Lovers) who add tremendous muscle to these folk-based songs. Despite these talents (especially James Bunton of Ohbijou who produced), Bonnetta maintains a firm grip on our attention-span long after his colleagues have gone home. Spirit Guides’ last-third is clearly gentler although still rife with organs and ambience, as if its protagonist’s explorations into nature have unexpectedly turned inward for the album’s lonesome twilight.

I second that very notion, waiting alone for a last subway to pull me out of the downtown core. My hearing’s coming back, having lost it somewhere at the show, and I spend these pacing steps listening to ‘History Books’, the last – and fittingly solo – song on Spirit Guides. Looking back over this Out of This Spark debut’s earth-shaking highs and contemplative sighs, rounded out by instrumental blurs (the afterglow segue of ‘Mazinaw Lake’) and a rainy field-recording (the aptly titled ‘November 1st, 2008, Lakefield, Ontario’), it’s hard to shake the feeling that at this late stage, having just wandered the season’s first frost, Evening Hymns has delivered Toronto’s best record of the year.

http://theskeletoncrewquarterly.blogspot.com/2009/11/spirit-guides-evening-hymns.html