Mason Jennings – Blood of Man

Mason Jennings told CNN in late September that he was getting “dark” and “raw” on his latest, Blood of Man. Now? Just now, man? Sure, croony, lovely tunes the likes of “Sorry Signs on Cash Machines,” “Be Here Now,” and “If You Need a Reason” made legions of femmes feel fuzzy, but those are love ditties that dudes can unabashedly appreciate too. Edwin McCain, he’s not. Mason’s the grizzled type, one birthed of grit and grace and now turning that all back on the world outside him.

This is to our benefit. Yea, there are the warm tracks for necking (“Sunlight”) here, but it’s largely a dry, rough record. Just gaze at the song titles: “Black Wind Blowing,” “Lonely Road,” “Blood of Man,” and “City of Ghosts,” to quote a few. Well, hell – is this the gloom-and-doom soundtrack to yet another Cormac McCarthy novel-turned-film, The Road perhaps?

Opener “City of Ghosts” boasts the detached-yet-personal production values of Nebraska-era Springsteen, if on uppers. It’s the initial hook but hardly reels you in. But then, “The Field” – the unadorned lament of a wartime parent, by turns tuneful and mournful. One searing line – “Tell me where’s your heart now that it’s stopped beating?” – just bleeds into another. Jennings reiterates the song’s thesis with a vital scream: “I don’t want no victory, I just want you baaaack!” Here is simply one of the most stirring songs to come out of the last six years of war.

“There’s a tourist in every heart that just wants to stay,” Jennings intones a song later, on “Tourist.” Jennings has earnestness in spades, but he lets his playful side in also for a heady balance. For one, “Ain’t No Friend of Mine” is a delightful shard of folk-punk,. But then “Sing Out” is an example of his earnest quotient overreaching a bit; it’s a sad-sack yawner, entirely unmemorable even after a few listens to the LP. Yes, there comes a point when plaintive just becomes plain. Jennings’ singing is faint on the song for good reason: He’s too honest, and for this.

Elsewhere the title track is a slow-burning, “oh, please come back” beer-stained letter to an erstwhile lover. It broods and builds: “Ocean mother, ocean child, are you mine or are you wild?/ Are you calling for the blood of man?” Jennings’s imagery so often blends the visceral with the pastoral, with the stuff of earth and sea (he’d be good friends with the poet Wendell Berry), and it’s no different here: “I’ll hide my dreams under the river tonight,” he sings, resigned to his romantic fate.

I dream of a quiet man
who explains nothing and defends
nothing, but only knows
where the rarest wildflowers
are blooming, and who goes,
and finds that he is smiling
not by his own will.

That’s Wendell Berry, by the by, and a couple listens to this LP reveals Jennings’ perhaps-subconscious poet-crush on the “Mad Farmer.”

There’s much to like here, on Blood of Man, even if it’s not all comfy. Jennings implores his listener to consider the album as just that – an entire body of work, an album, maybe even a child (again pondering the terribly beautiful “The Field” here) – and to stop and smell life’s roses while respecting its thorns. This is your soundtrack to autumn.

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Tagged as: Folk, minneapolis, Rock

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