1. In Our Time
2. Woody's Annie Hall
3. Lost My Way
4. Blow Up The Bridge
5. Hard Times
6. Broken Down
7. Hills of Rome
8. Bella Ciao
9. Pilgrim Soul
10. Soho
11. Another Man
12. Off The Rails
May whatever Gods there be bless Jason McNiff and
his unpretentious, feelgood acoustic folksy
loveliness. Sometimes all you want from music is for
it to waft over you like a warm summer breeze,
demanding nothing and challenging you only about as
much as a small kitten might.
Jason McNiff is just such a performer, serving up
perfect relaxation music for a Friday night wind-down
as you put the office, the bills, the nine-to-five and
the whole bloody world behind you for an evening. Open
a box of chocolates, grab a glass of milk and lie back
on the sofa to drink it in while you try to stay
awake.
Somewhere between a greatest hits collection and a
sampler album, In My Time contains four new songs -
the self-penned Lost My Way and Pilgrim Soul plus his
first recordings of traditional offerings Hard Times
and Bella Ciao - along with eight others taken from
his previous three albums, Off The Rails, Nobody's Son
and Another Man.
The son of a Polish mother and an Irish father,
from Bradford via Nottingham and Middlesex while
hanging around with a sort-of Sex Pistol
(occasional bass stand-in Andy Allen, later of Steve
Cook and Paul Jones's post-Pistols band The
Professionals) and the nascent Libertines,
his talent lies somewhere between Pete Doherty
at his most tender and Nick Drake at his most
optimistic, curiously soaked in Americana while
remaining resolutely British.
Hardly surprising then that the kind of venue in
which you'll find McNiff is London's tiny 12 Bar Club,
a (not too) hidden treasure that plays host to the
likes of Jackie Leven and Sally Timms.
Accompanied by fiddles, an organ and lap steel
guitars, McNiff breezes his way through his own
material old and new and yet still finds a way to make
the trad arr intruders welcome. Hard Times is so pared
down and fragile it sounds as if it might break at any
moment while in his hands Bella Ciao sounds more like
a love song than an anti-fascist protest from the last
century.
All of this makes McNiff the type of
singer-songwriter you could listen to all day, so far
from the sensibilities of punk that you wonder what
anyone who ever went within a continent of the genre
might want with him, but the delicacy of the
production teases out his talent rather than submerges
it, honing the edges to the sharpness of razor blades.
Music as beautiful as this is there to be savoured,
turned down low in a darkened room where it can be
listed to with no distractions. Breathe in and enjoy.
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