The Nothing Venture by Five O' Clock People

Reviewed by Tony Cummings

An advert in the American trade press quoting a chap from a Palm Beach radio station alerted me to this album. ““This Day” is the song that we all hoped Jars would have written and recorded.” And certainly, the opener here, the lilting mid tempo “Lunar” quickly indicates a vocalist, at times, uncannily like Dan Haseltine. But it would be inaccurate to present this team as some bunch of clones hastily signed by corporate America to duplicate the Jars’ phenomenally successful sound. Five O’Clock People stand in a long tradition of thoughtful art rockers whose creatively deft rhythms, poetic imagery and painfully honest lyrics of love and loss strike a note of recognition wherever American students gather. For those prepared to investigate, there’s much to marvel at, like the eerie, synthesizer soundscape of “Glass” or the mandolin and accordion driven roots romp of “Now I Sing” or the breathtakingly sad “Fall Silent” (my nomination for the slowest song of the year). But it’s the strength of their lyric writing which eats into your consciousness, bristling with intriguing metaphors (“Balancing the weight of the state I’m in/On the head of a pin”), literary allusions (“Precious does that grace appear/Now Frodo finds the strength to face his fears”) and literally dozens of insights of that paradoxical tension – of following a transcendent God as we grapple with our human frailty. I hope this becomes a huge album Stateside.