Jinnwoo - dreamcreatures (2021)

The cracked fragility of Ben Webb’s voice is the first thing that strikes you about dreamcreatures. Repeated listens bring further revelations: the unusual arrangements that provide a thrilling contrast to the ostensibly lo-fi presentation of the sound, the disarmingly honest lyrical content, the strings that come in unexpected waves.

And that’s just the first song, London, Brighton, which was written in response to a friend’s health anxiety but which grows to encompass the more general fears that seem such a large part of our everyday existence. Although this album was written before the Covid pandemic was even a twinkle in the eye of an unfortunate pangolin, there is prescience in the way it deals with heightened states of anxiety and with nostalgia for a time when life was perhaps less fraught with uncertainty.

Nostalgia is a prominent Jinnwoo preoccupation. Milk, which finds him at his most confessional, dissects the past with obsessive detail, backed by a surprising and almost carnivalesque piano part that sounds like a descent into a very contemporary species of madness.

Musically, the gently off-kilter folk acts as a kind of sleight of hand that conceals the gut-punch of the lyrics until the last moment. The melodic strangeness of The Mark, for example, shifts imperceptibly from a quietly exploratory beginning to an inexorable denouement, while Letter To SL is simplicity personified – a spare guitar line giving free rein to Webb’s vocals – while its lyrics weave a story of genuine detail and moral complexity.

In the five years since the first Jinnwoo album Webb has been busy as a collaborator rather than a solo artist, enjoying stints in trad favourites Bird In The Belly and the a cappella supergroup Green Ribbons, so you might be forgiven for thinking that this follow-up has been at the forefront of Webb’s mind for a while. The truth is not quite that simple. Some bad experiences with record labels and with the music business, in general, meant that he shelved the project for not long after the songs were written. The new recordings had to be coaxed out of Webb by friend and Bird In The Belly co-member Tom Pryor. The upshot is that the album has a kind of double life: its past self exists as a kind of ghost, a translucent skin that has been shed and left behind.

The songs, with their fixation on the past and on personal change, seem eerily to acknowledge this double life. Wonderland is all about the inability to escape an old way of life. Bambi And Beef, written while Webb was still a teenager, is about moving on from the death of a friend. It is also about the difficulties of growing up as a gay man in rural England. Together with Your Right Side – a tender recollection of the colourful London pub scene – it forms the deep, queer heart of the album.

Some of dreamcreatures’ most beautiful moments come in its closing songs. The aforementioned Milk is one highlight, as is the oddly psychedelic The New Ghosts Move, another song about the passing of time and the physical process of ageing set to urgent peals of electric guitar. The album’s final statement, Your Table, is perhaps its most moving. It is a powerful, at times almost unbearable, depiction of emotional and physical longing, Webb’s voice becoming a conduit for need and loss.

dreamcreatures draws its power from enigmatic sources: there is a tension between, on one side, Webb’s self-confessed lack of confidence and, on the other, his evident and supreme gifts as a songwriter and singer. It all makes for a raw, quietly uncompromising and thoroughly engrossing listen.