Morning Star - 'My Place In The Dust' (Sink & Stove Records, 2001).

Jesse D Vernon was the guitarist and co-songwriter in The Moonflowers, one of Bristol's most fondly remembered bands of the 1990s. Morning Star was what he did next. A few years after this review was written he moved to France, although I believe he's still making music under the Morning Star name.

CHOKE takes on Jesse Vernon's latest tales from "Rainbohemia" and finds Parisian Walkways mercifully free from the likes of Gary Moore.

This morning I'm feeling a little strange, not to say disorientated…

Nearly two years into the 21st Century and I'm listening to Bristolian singer Jesse Vernon, who is suffering from the delusion that he's an absinthe-damaged, Gauloise-smoking Left Bank Bohemian with a consumptive lung and a copy of Stendhal's "On Love" in his threadbare pocket. Suddenly, It's 1942 and Paris is occupied by the forces of hatred and oppression. The Government has turned traitor. At the entrance to a café off-duty German soldiers and nervous intellectuals listen enraptured as a lone accordian tells of forces beyond the control of man and his engines of destruction. See, here in Paris in 1942 that's just about the most subversive thing going. After all, The bloody Resistance are still bickering amongst themselves about the most daring way to wear a beret without losing one's chic.

Morning Star tend to have this effect on me, and it's always unexpected, but then again this is songwriting of the highest calibre. Songwriting that takes the oldest theme of all, debased tens of thousands of times in bad poetry and cheap songs and nearly killed by greetings cards and Disneyland and Meg Bloody Ryan. Jesse is, of course, singing about Love.

I never expected to like Morning Star as much as I do. I'm the sort of person who hears the words "romantic singer/songwriter" and thinks of pedestrian crap like David Gray or sentimental nonsense like Dido. I was so wrong. Jesse may be 'traditional' in one sense, but his imagination is strong enough to make his tired and over-worked subject new again. The Bohemian thing may be a conceit, but it's well enough developed for you to suspend your disbelief. It may also be a cliché but rest assured there's enough genuine novelty here to make up for it. It's perhaps also worth noting at this point that Morning Star already sell respectably on the other side of the Channel, and in fact this album is co-released on French label Microbe.

The melodies are the thing. One minute Jesse's leading a tango, the next he's singing the blues and then he's in some kind of weird middle ground between Portishead and Jacques Brel in which strings, brass and choir join forces in a vast exultation of the dignity of love.
Impressive, moving stuff. Most of the songs are understated and unshowy but this is not background music by any means. This is music to turn up loud and lose yourself in: powerful food for the imagination.

In these irony-suffocated times few songwriters have the guts to write about love in an honest, unsentimental way and most of the few that can seem fixated on the darker side of the experience. Cynics! 'My Place in the Dust' is the sort of album that shows you new beauty in familiar places and finds optimism in the sheer possibility of human relations and the power of human emotion. Vive La Resistance!

Originally published in Choke, Issue 3.