Jon Allen’s “Deep River” Reviewed By Folk Radio UK
Jon Allen’s upcoming album, “Deep River,” has been reviewed by Folk Radio UK! Here’s a bit of what they had to say in the extensive review:
“Winchester born, London-based Jon Allen’s Deep River is a collection of songs with solid roots and a sense of place that can only be articulated using the landscaped language of this sceptred isle. If good music is all about conjuring images in the mind, there’s plenty to choose from here – we get sleepy country lanes overhung with Oaks, fields bordered with blooming hedgerows running down to bubbling brooks and slow-moving rivers, cobbled streets with the lights of a tavern on their corner, music and laughter spilling out into the night. There are windswept moors, mill-wheels and honest, hard toil, high days and holidays, Jerusalem rising into the air from the village church. Deep River is the bucolic summer haze and muted orchestration of Nick Drake, the urban spit and sawdust noise of Ray Davies and the barely restrained blues licks and rasp of John Martyn or early Peter Green.
If all that sounds like the album has a little too much going on or a lack of direction, fear not; as with most good art, quality will out. The disparate elements and influences are corralled by the emotion in Allen’s voice and his consistent guitar work, factors that weave their way through the stylistic changes until you’re presented with a work that is much more than the sum of its parts. If the aforementioned masters of their art have big shoes to fill, it’s an unfair comparison; Allen isn’t emulating them, but is unmistakably a son of their respective schools.
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You can check out the full review here!
