Ten Simple Songs About Death – John E Vistic (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

If you have come to this new John E Vistic album for your usual fix of brash and bombastic rock ‘n’ roll, for a slice of music that both kicks arse and cuts the mustard, then you are out of luck. This time out, anyway. As the album title suggests, this set of songs is a simpler affair, a more considered and personal set of songs. As you can glean from the title, those songs are themed around death, or more properly, the cycle of life, of growing up, growing older, of watching the world move beyond our understanding and friends beyond this mortal coil. If you know John as the head cheerleader of the heads-down-no-nonsense-mindless-boogie, rock and roll party, Ten Simple Songs…casts him in a very new, different and intriguing light indeed.

With mainly just guitar and voice, these one-take wonders take us into a realm that might seem to be the bastion of a modern-day Leonard Cohen or a less out-there Tom Waits. But it is a path that Johnny walks with brilliant precision, often sounding like a latter-day Johnny Cash, especially on songs such as This Is My Island, This Is My Home.

There are moments of close introspection with The Mistakes I’ve Made, memories of his own formative years in The World That I Once Knew, musings on blame and responsibility with the funereal and dirge-like It’s Never Our Fault and Dylan-esque folk-wisdom and narrative style woven through Hercules Choice.

But what Ten Simple Songs… reveals most clearly about Mr Vistic is not what an astute songwriter he is; we knew that all along, but what a thoughtful person he is. If his usual rock and roll mode hides such revelations, the starkness of these songs and the more laid-bare lyrics show him to be a man of deep thoughts and high-minded literature, street smarts and philosophical bents, of wit and wisdom, someone as at home with the profound and he is profane.

Rock and rollers, they ain’t what they used to be. Thank god!