Matt Jones’ Crescent release its first album in ten years, Resin Pockets, on Geographic Music. If it’s been a long while since Little Waves, the intimate treasure they released in 2007, that’s because much like peers Movietone and Flying Saucer Attack, Crescent move in slow motion, but with sure steps, only doing things when they feel right and true. You can hear this in the confidence that underpins the nine songs written by Crescent leader Matt Jones for Resin Pockets, an album that nestles beautifully into a long history of visionary outsider English pop craft, in the same vein as the isle’s solitary voices, all singing against the grain – the playfulness of Kevin Ayers; the grace of Vashti Bunyan; the rhapsody of Robert Wyatt; the melancholy of Epic Soundtracks; the revelations of Bill Fay. It’s an album of joyous melody and evocative poetry, of community and intimacy. The nine songs on Resin Pockets were recorded both indoors and outdoors, in everyday spaces. Matt predominantly performed the album, in collaboration with his brother Sam on drums, tambourine and ‘lookout’, though some other familiar faces appear, too: Kate Wright of Movietone is part of the evening chorus that closes Roman Roads; Lisa Brook and Michal William of Headfall are there, too, huffing away on melodicas. There’s an ‘intimate immensity’ to the album: it’s close in your ear, as though you’re sharing the room with Jones as he plays, and yet the outdoors recording grounds the album in the natural world, too. Jones talks about the effect of having passers-by as incidental audiences, of engaging with the immediate environment and the “tiny coincidences of sound”. “A lot of this album seems to be looking back, doesn’t it?”, says Jones himself of the new album. This is the essence of Resin Pockets: album as a work of memory and remembering, travail de mémoire, but also album as memoir, casting a glance across several decades of lived experience.LP - Heavyweight Vinyl With Download Code.
