Jon Arthur Schmidt seems to be an artist who stands with his creative feet in many different worlds simultaneously, as evidenced by his latest album From The Marrow. There is a spiritual and personal quality to his music but it never seems to step over into the realms of the preaching or devotional, seeming more like enlightened philosophies garnered by looking to one’s own soul rather than looking upwards and outwards for the answers. It is also an album that has a timeless feeling and many of the songs found here would be as at home in the 60’s counter-culture or the seventies folk revival as they are in the 21st century.
Songs such as Sweetness are built around a hushed grace, It’s All Falling is eloquent and darkly elegant and Eagle Eyes is quiet and hypnotic, existing slightly on the edge of this world and almost sounding as if it is an echo picked up from another dimension.
They say that less is more, and From The Marrow contains so much less, such is the deftness and skill with which Jon Arthur Schmidt cuts his sonic cloth, and the result, natural, is an album that delivers so much more.
