Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Ask anyone, pick on a stranger, find a friend to converse with down the local, take a trip out to your nearest and dearest and ask them a simple yet illuminating question, take heed of their answer and then go out into the street and ask the same line of enquiry to a thousand others, the startling realisation is that everybody has their own truth, the mantra in which they live by and the devotion to which their serve it.
Nobody’s fact of life is the same as anybody else’s, and yet in some souls The Truth is plain to see, it lights up their face, it is full of candour and for Laurence Jones it is the sense of genuine appreciation for The Blues that marks out the words of the legitimate and the powerful reality of being a man in the 21st Century to hold up as example of musical sincerity.
It is a sincerity that comes with placing your trust in change, not a huge departure, not one that sees the musician leave the fidelity of his craft and go off in search of the unremitting popular hit, but one that embraces the concept of being open to a new influence, of not standing still and slowly sinking in the quagmire of broken dreams or wasted opportunities; this is the truth as Laurence Jones sees it and it is a truth that sits with ease at the soul of anyone who comes across it.
To move on, to shift the boundary of art, to go somewhere new and find that experimentation and conducting yourself in a slightly different way can lead to a new path of work, one that perhaps may have more structure, the needle of dedication pointing anywhere else than north, and one in which simplicity is to be seen as divine cool.
In tracks such as Don’t Let Me Go, Keep Me Up At Night, Give Me Your Time and Can’t Go On Without You, the Blues becomes a powerful beast because they have the resonance of taking the music into a new light, one endorsed perhaps by the great Eric Clapton when he recorded the sublime Behind The Mask, a salute to ongoing process and growth and one that gets to The Truth of progression, to never be afraid to move on, even by the slightest footfall, it makes life so much more fantastic.
Laurence Jones release The Truth on March 9th 2018.
Laurence Jones will be performing at the Band on the Wall, Manchester on May 3rd.
Ian D. Hall