November 26th, 2009

Evening Hymns – (Out of This Spark)

Spirit Guides
Steve Guimond

Jonas Bonnetta lurks behind the long shadows of Evening Hymns. The Peterborough multi-instrumentalist troubadour presents his debut full-length, a quirky and rousing pop record created with the help of many of his friends, who just so happen to come from some pretty good bands: The Wooden Sky, Forest City Lovers, Ohbijou, The D’Urbervilles. Bonnetta conducts lessons in song influenced by folk, rock and country passions, easily gliding back and forth between larger and rousing ensemble numbers and quieter one-man-standing confessionals. Definitely worth checking out.

http://www.hour.ca/music/spin.aspx?iIDDisque=5757

Cedars

Review Of Evening Hymns’ Spirit Guides and giveaway

eveninghymns.comThey say you can tell a lot about someone by the company they keep, and nowhere is this more true than in the case of Peterborough’s Jonas Bonnetta, aka Evening Hymns, who first earned notice in these parts back in June opening up for Ohbijou. The liner notes of his second album, the just-released Spirit Guides, reads like a who’s who of the Bellwoods crew, including members of Forest City Lovers, Ohbijou and The Wooden Sky, to name but a few, and if you want to take that as an implicit “RIYL”, then you won’t be disappointed.

Throughout Spirit Guides, Bonnetta echoes the sounds of his peers – Ohbijou’s orchestral flourishes, the Wooden Sky’s rustic melancholy, Bruce Peninsula’s ghostly chorals, The Acorn’s nimble balancing of folk and rock – and as such, sounds and feels immediately comfortable to anyone who’s been following the sound of Toronto/southern Ontario over the last few years. Sublimated together, however, they form something that’s so cohesive and perfectly suited to the songs they adorn, that focusing on its familiarity is to miss the point entirely.

Wearing reverb like an early morning fog, Spirit Guides is the sound of Bonnetta wandering through the wilderness, both literally and allegorically, burdened by memory and regret and searching for salvation, shelter, something – anything. His voice is warm and worn, inherently a thing of the earth, but it still seeks to soar and when buoyed by the host of ethereal backing vocals, manages to do so. And for all the weightiness that’s implied, Spirit Guides is still every bit a pop record, full of wonderful melodies and hooks and, most importantly, the ability to make the deepest melancholia feel uplifting. It’s a lonely record that never feels alone. And though I didn’t realize it on initial listens, perhaps too busy playing “who does this remind me of”, it’s wholly remarkable and quite possibly essential.

http://www.chromewaves.net/2009/11/review-of-evening-hymns-spirit-guides-and-giveaway/

Evening Hymns
Spirit Guides
By Vish Khanna

On his debut record as Evening Hymns, Peterborough, ON’s Jonas Bonnetta harkens back to singer-songwriters of the early ’70s, evenly weaving narratives together in songs that operate well outside of populist frameworks. Few real hooks rest within Spirit Guides, a sprawling, contemporary folk record that possesses a temporal angst. As such, any visceral connection to Bonnetta’s expression is dictated by how much emotional engagement one can muster with his shifting, moody songs. There’s a ragged glory to the layered progression of “Dead Deer,” which begins with a folk shuffle before vocal punctuations and sweeping strings lift its wings. The whole of “Mtn. Song” simmers, promising a climax that never arrives, but the inkling is enough. On songs like “Broken Rifle,” Evening Hymns sounds like a lo-fi Jackson Browne, armed with abstracted personal tales that pulse with heart and soul. (Out of this Spark)

http://www.exclaim.ca/musicreviews/latestsub.aspx?csid1=139&csid2=870&fid1=42733

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