Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Some have money, some have Time, a few possess a certain talent that they readily dispense and others are quite content to set fire to the world in their pursuit of their own version of the dream, yet happiness is a commodity, an emotion that no one seems to want to share unless there is something in it for them, they will store it, lock it away as if it has the same value to them as Gold or the Dollar in their pocket.
Nobody has Happiness To Burn, to go out on a weekend flush with joy and good spirits and stop someone in the street randomly and say, come spend some Happiness with me, come spread the laughter, pass around the collection hat and put a tonne of cheerfulness in it so that others can benefit.
In Jenny Van West’s new album, Happiness To Burn, it is more of an instruction, a playful Americana inspired set of songs that open their heart and the confessional box and find a way to be timeless, Time being stored, the fire contagious but more importantly as each song bathes and relishes its moment in the listener’s conscious, it is the delight of sharing a joy of expression that makes the album sing loudly and its various messages contained taken very much to heart.
You are never alone when there is a song playing in your mind, when a smile catches you unawares, when a melody reminds you of a distant love, for another fellow traveller on the road we take or for a memory of a song once admired; it is in the upbeat and sublime that kicks of the album and this reconnection with the past, one that soon develops and entwines itself around the listener, creeping in to every pore and every notion available.
In songs such as Live In A New Way, Where I Stand, Empty Bowl, Twenty Seven Dollars, Thresholds and the album finale in Embers, Jenny Van West, her producer Shane Alexander and the band, Jesse Siebenberg, (son of the phenomenal and equally talented Bob Siebenberg), Carl Byron, Ted Russell Kamp, Austin Beede and Justine Bennett, have not only found a way to see Happiness burn, light the fire in which to keep warm as the cinders glow and dance in the ballroom of life, but they have collectively offered the listener an overpowering and legitimate reason in which to remember what it was to spread joy.
Even in the darkest of times, there needs to be a light that glows and Ms. Van West provides the spark which guides the way.
Jenny Van West releases Happiness To Burn on April 20th.
Ian D. Hall