Wednesday, April 2, 2025

Album Review: JJ Sweetheart - Big Things


Time for some wholesome woodland jams, from a guy who lives in *checks browser tab* ... Minneapolis! .... I mean, suuuuuure... why the hell not- Minnesota is a very forested state and I could imagine myself needing to live out a scene or two from Gary Paulsen's Hatchet if I ventured farther than a minute off a paved road there, so screw it, everybody who lives there is a basically a druid as far as I'm concerned. Including JJ Sweetheat, a decidedly modern sort of persona, but one with enough grit under his nails and sifted into his aesthetics that you'd swear he spent just about every night with nothing but his own hot breath between him and the open, starry sky. Big Things is JJ's conspicuously titled debut EP where he serenades your innocent ears with an ashy style of campfire-huddling wyrd folk that echos and wails like a diminutive cyclone rising like a dancing prophet from the hollow of a dead tree. "This World" welcomes you into JJ's realm of dusted soles and dusky dances, escaping the press of urbania with drops of electric-country guitars and the insistent, hypno-viper rattle of tambourine percussion. Next "Feral Feelings" draws you further into the updraft of his psychedelic bonfire with its darkly dreamy affect, where you are then tossed up and spun like a dandelion pappus on a cool September current on the mortius-minded fluster-tumble "Too the Grave." The spicy-sweet stroll of "Cinnamon" is wound around a cluster of suitably sticky hooks and gooey guitar rips, while closer "Heart Medal" is a delightfully overheated but subtly starting evaporation point from which JJ can make his exit into the dark night air like smoke escaping a dying ember. You can lose your map, lose your shoes, even lose your mind, but as long as you keep your ears open to Big Things, you'll never be totally lost.