Glenn Jones
Fleeting
THRILL JOCKEY
8/10
Fleeting, the sixth solo full-length from former Cul de Sac guitarist and banjoist Glenn Jones, was recorded by engineer Laura Baird at a house on the banks of the Rancocas Creek in New Jersey, and its ten songs, comprised solely of Jones’s alternately tuned acoustic guitar and banjo, tug and pull on the conventions of American Primitivism—the style created by Jones’s noted influence and collaborator, the late John Fahey. The mood is gentle, and songs like “Flower Turned Inside-Out” and “June Too Soon, October All Over”—the latter featuring the ambient natural sounds of Jones’s Jersey surroundings—are among the loveliest in his catalog. On “In Durance Vile” and the banjo meditation “Spokane River Falls,” his echoing trills evoke spooky mysteries. With “Portrait of Basho as a Young Dragon,” he memorializes guitarist Robbie Basho, whose ecstatic reveries clearly inform Jones’s open compositions as much as the ghostly blues of Fahey.
