Joe Henry: Invisible Hour (A lot of presence but no soul)
Joe Henry’s music has long been marked by depth, maturity, and elegance. All of which holds true on his new record Invisible Hour. What has been lost on the new album however are his accustomed resonances with jazz and the blues.
Beginning more than ten years ago, with his great album Scar, on which Henry collaborated with Ornette Coleman to career defining effect, Joe Henry has consistently delivered music by turns elegiac, nocturnal, seductive, and strange. All while exploring ranges of jazz and blues attitude and atmosphere that never felt forced but always authentic and deeply rooted in the truth.
This he accomplished by involving authentic artists of the jazz stratosphere like the aforementioned Coleman, Don Byron on his circus side show tableau Tiny Voices, guitarist Bill Frissell on the lovelorn Civillians, and a whole range of brilliant session musicians on the master works Blood From The Stars and Reverie.
On Invisible Hour however those roots have flown the coop and what’s left are richly textured exercises with a lot of presence but no soul. Coming from any other artist these recordings might seem exceptional. But from someone who has delivered such rich interpretations of the blues as 2009’s Blood From the Stars and 2011’s Reverie, Invisible Hour seems nearly uninhabited, oddly bloodless, and strangely tame.
One has to trust that an artist as capable and proven as Joe Henry knew what he was doing as he wrote and recorded Invisible Hour. And what’s more I’m willing to believe that he achieved what he set out to achieve. It appears he was attempting to find the same sort of traction in the folk and acoustic singer/songwriter traditions that he’d previously found in expressions of the African American musical tradition. And maybe it would take a James Taylor fan to tell you if he pulled it off or not. But to me it just sounds pallid and underwhelming.
