Although my musical tastes generally lean more towards the extreme end of the metal spectrum, I do have a massive soft spot for folk music and Jonas And I is a band whose music almost immediately caught my interest after hitting the play button. Their debut album These Days is a light and airy feel-good album that is an easy and accessible listen that you’ll keep wanting to return to, featuring some absolutely stunning instrumentation and emotive vocals from start to finish.
There’s plenty of great tracks on the album and one of the strongest songs is These Days, which also serves as the title track. It has a great pace to it, with the keyboard line in the latter half of the song really adding another edge to the piece and giving it a feel-good vibe. Another great track is the slower number Awake Or Dreaming, which sees a really emotive vocal performance coupled with some powerful and big-sounding instrumentation.
As a whole, These Days is a stunning listen but can arguably be described as somewhat of a ‘safe’ piece. There’s no shame in this as this is only their debut album, but on the other hand it would also be nice to see the band go out of the lines and take a few different approaches for their next album. However, this is a great starting point for Jonas And I, with plenty of interesting and engaging songs on the album, and it will be interesting to see where they go from here.
8/10
