Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The opening song of Jon Chi’s new album, Another Rising Sun, perhaps sums up the atmosphere and belief the listener experiences when listening to it. Words You Can Believe In as both a title and an adage has surely not been suggested with such accuracy in quite a while. It is to Jon Chi’s credit that such words are taken with such humility, sheer sincerity and abundance of faith, for faith is never displaced in the album and sincerity is what binds it together.
It is the allusion to the mix of both past and present but with the sideways glance at looking at it the motion of Time passing with the perspective of change that makes Another Rising Son such an enjoyable piece of music and arguably an album of necessity. Jon Chi offers the listener much over the course of the album, not only perspective and honesty, but also clarity and empathy, the ability to see through another’s eyes the transparent lucidity of breathing the same air as your fellow human.
The clarity is supplied by the talent that comes oozing out of the album, that comes rushing head on in the performances of the likes of John Wesley McVicker Jr., Theo Merriweather, Daryl Tucker amd John Calarco. Jon Chi’s overall arc of sublime songs is enhanced by having musicians who understand fully the right expression needed and in which leaves no gaps unexplored or uncharted.
It is through to Jon Chi that the proclamations of enjoyment must be passed too. The ability to look back to previous generations, to take what they gave the world and make it sound unique enough for a new period in time is a hard one to capture. It is the musical equivalent to Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black, a book that is steeped in being out of time that its positive creative force binds the times together; so it is with Jon Chi’s Another Rising Son, an album so fresh but steeped in the past that there is hardly the tick of dusty old grandfather clock between them.
It is the tick between the tock in songs such as Killer From Our Hometown, The Battle Is Over (But The War Goes On), One More Shot At The Light, Pray For Rain and Bound For Glory that really grabs the ears, the unseen but audibly embracing being perfected and treasured.
Another Rising Son may only be Jon Chi’s second album but it feels as though he has been gearing up to deliver such a piece all his life. Strong, forceful, moody and magnificent; Jon Chi delivers with a flourish.
Ian D. Hall