Joshua Burnside is back with his newest album It’s Not Going To Be Okay, a beautifully emotive, exposing look at his journey through grief that is possibly his best work so far.
Only 13 months after the release of his highly acclaimed last album Teeth of Time, Burnside returns with an album that takes stock, pauses to reflect, and glances back into his past with a new sensitivity and light touch. He has centred this album around the loss of his close friend Dean Jendoubi and It’s Not Going To Be Okay is a direct response to this experience.
There is a clear urgency throughout, a sense that these works are not archives that have been finally released, or ideas that have been processed, tweaked, and collaborated with, but fully formed stories that did not exist before Burnside sat down in his Vault studios in Belfast to write about his dear friend.
What surprises me most, is how Burnside has managed to balance such a heart-breaking tone of loss with his bright almost humorous lyrics. He’s captured a friendship that was clearly fun filled and full of love while also retaining a sense of poignant eulogy to the work. In comparison to his other work, It’s Not Going To Be Okay steps away from Burnside’ usual fusion of sound.
He has an amazing ability to experiment with production processes, layering and electronic soundscapes, to combine sounds that are becoming more and more prolific in contemporary releases with his folk foundations. But with this album, he hasn’t gone down this path.
There is a lovely sense that the urgency and personal need to produce this album left Burnside without the urge to explore contemporary electro-fusion processes. It feels grounded, confident and powerful to strip back his methods to such a raw exposure. When you think of classic songs and the stories from their writers that these just ‘came to
them,’ and were written in 5 minutes, this album resonates the same.
Beautifully simple, poetic and full of heart.
