MORE THAN FRIENDS

On ‘More Than Friends’ JWestern fans his palette of influences like a deck of cards. Pick a card (any card) and atop of the trademark coiling Jazz-inflected guitars & laissez-faire vocals, you’ll be treated to watery soundscapes, bejewelled artisanal production flourishes, beat-textured nuance, swirling layers and sepia toned pads. This is genre trespass for the indie-trained ear.

The re-contextualisation of sampling feeds the visual world of JWestern where places look dreamily familiar but just out of tangible reach. This is typified in the video accompanying the single, in which suited and booted JWestern holds down a landline conversation from a remote phone box to a lover’s home via the ocean, a forest, fields, a motorway, and some neon-pooled city centre. All the locations are generic in a sense but John’s genius is picking out the recognisable from the indistinguishable. These are the fleeting spaces we pass but rarely spend time in. The places we glimpse for seconds on a car journey and they’re gone. In that sense, they inhabit all our subconsciousness but we can’t claim to know them. Being gripless on feelings of newness is an interplay explored in the lyrics. JWestern explains: “A lot of stuff was happening that I felt I didn’t have enough control over, or enough words to communicate.”