Jozef Van Wissem
It Is Time for You to Return
CRAMMED DISCS
6/10
Jozef Van Wissem’s proper follow-up to the 2013 award-winning Only Lovers Left Alive soundtrack finds him shrugging off Jim Jarmusch’s abrasive guitar rain and returning to stark solo compositions for lute. These meticulously wound arrangements demonstrate both the instrument’s complex potential and Van Wissem’s own virtuosic abilities. Bass strings resonate and hang with warmth usually reserved for keys on opener “If There’s Nothing Left Where Will You Go?” and the interlaced picking and wandering tempo of “Once More with Feeling” seem to owe as much to American primitivism as to medieval hymnody. Though the album is driven by a melancholy sense of isolation, It Is Time for You to Return’s few imperfections—the creak of a chair, a scattering of flubbed notes, the desperation in the lutenist’s voice—rescue both Van Wissem’s sentiment and his instrument from the mild hell of mere curiosity.
