Album Review - Redemption City

Artist: Joseph Arthur (USA)

Release Date: 18 January, 2012

My first experience with Joseph Arthur was when he came out here a couple of years ago for the Byron Bay Bluesfest as one third of the folk supergroup, Fistful Of Mercy.  In that trio, he was the unknown quantity for Australian audiences.  Ben Harper’s credentials are well known in Australia.  He’s huge here, capable of selling out our largest venues.  Dhani Harrison has the benefit of being the son of one of the most well-known musicians of all-time.  His father was, of course, Beatle and solo artist, George Harrison.  Joseph Arthur, on the other hand, had the, “Joseph who?” factor about him.  I personally find Fistful Of Mercy a little boring.  Their intentions are noble and they deserve to be listened to, but it just doesn’t do much for me.  However, during their Bluesfest set, Arthur was given the opportunity to play one of his solo songs for the audience, In The Sun.  I loved it.  It was the clear highlight of their set and I made a quick mental note to check out some more of his material once I got home.  However, once I got home, I promptly forgot to delve any deeper than the track he played at Bluesfest.  My second encounter with him was a couple of solo sets he played over the PJ20 weekend in September last year where I was utterly captivated by this man creating an entire band with nothing more than his guitar, his voice and a loop station.  In the middle of songs he would use blank canvases to paint abstract, improvised art pieces (which, I’m told, are auctioned for charity after each show).  His music was unlike anything I had heard.  It was almost a spoken word/rap style vocal over folk rock music.  It was an interesting combination, but what struck me the most was the message he was trying to get across, and it is this message that is the sole focus of his latest album, Redemption City.

Available as a free download from Arthur’s website, Redemption City, is a sprawling double album about the loss of hope within humanity and how, now that we are approaching the point of bottoming out, we can begin to see the way forward.  It’s about refocusing our energy away from seeking happiness through working careers that we don’t really care for and towards a truer form of freedom and an internal peace that we can only achieve if we work together as a whole.  That’s a pretty big statement to make and an incredibly large task to take on.  Like most double albums with big themes, there are a few missteps on Redemption City, but there are also some tracks that completely make up for these moments where the album isn’t totally engaging.

            Opening song, Travel As Equals, is one of those tracks.  It absolutely nails the big ideas of the album and is the perfect opener for this sprawling set.  It speaks of man’s need to come together, to put aside the fickle nature of modern pop-culture and selfish self-promotion, and dispense of our misguided ideas about long careers with lots of money providing us with happiness.  Arthur lays it all out plainly and simply when he suggests that, “You might have a greater income / or you might be dumb or dull / Either way I won’t leave you / We travel as equals or not at all”.  It may seem a little too simplistic to some, but what Arthur is doing, while giving us an idea of his social philosophy, is setting the listener up to go on a journey with him.  He’s suggesting that listening to this record is not a case of you being in awe of a performer for their song-writing skill or their technical prowess.  He’s making the listener his equal and laying down the basis of the relationship for the twenty-three tracks to follow.  Arthur wants to take you on a tour of his city of redemption and he wants you to experience it as his equal, not as his fan.

            Another highlight has to be the stirring, Yer Only Job, where Arthur sings about finding some kind of internal truth.  Again, he lays it all down in a fairly plain, conversational manner when he speaks/raps/sings, “Your only job is to be free / Free to live inside a tree / Free to see the way you see / If it’s strange then let it be”.  Again, Arthur is reinforcing his ideas about true freedom.  It’s an idea that we are constantly led to believe that our happiness and freedom lies within our ability to increase our monetary income.  Through various avenues (whether they are right or wrong is totally up to you), we are generally led to believe that if we have more money, we’ll be able to afford more things that will make us happy, that we will be able to afford more time to do our own thing and be free at some stage.  Unfortunately, what ends up happing is that we work and work and work in order to, hopefully one day, have enough money to be free and then we die.  Arthur wants his listeners to realise that there is a freedom within them that can be accessed through simple choices.  These choices may be terrifying because they present us with the unknown, but it within this unknown that we just might find ourselves and live a life worth living.

            Now, I’m well aware that all of this could potentially come across as pretentious, hippie wank.  And a lot of people may see it that way.  That’s totally fine, that’s their opinion.  But Arthur manages to deliver his message to his audience with some truly great sound scapes that perfectly capture the ideas and emotion of his words.  The music genuinely made me feel as though I could quite easily quite my job and just roam the earth finding new experience after new experience and truly live.  And it’s this very quality that is the strength of Redemption City.  While it might be flat in patches and too long for most modern attention spans, there is no doubt that there are moments of true brilliance waiting to be discovered by anyone willing to listen.  So why not give it a go.  Download it here and have a listen.  It doesn’t cost you anything.