In the land of the bedsit lived a pretty princess whose heart many princes of the goatee beard and canvas shoes persuasion wished to capture so that they consequently could use her for the purpose of aural stimulation. Too cynical a start to a review of Jo Mango's new single, perhaps? Or perhaps not.
Jo Mango strikes me as that sort of aspirational conquest to your more artistically oriented male. She’s pretty without being threatening to other women and she sings with the kind of wistfulness that harks back to the glory days of English folk music. Before you venture that I am doing the lady an injustice, let’s dig a bit deeper than the presentation of the songs as therein lies Ms Mango’s real strengths. “The Moth and the Moon” is seemingly fragile and big city observational in style but the more you listen to it, the more you begin to think that the song is a metaphorical take on the isolation that comes with the self obsession and failure to notice the beauty that exist around us all. Just like her spirit is fading away into the darkness, in fact. “The Black Sun” is in a similar vein but scales things up a bit sonically with choral parts adding to the air of quiet suffering and melancholia.
It would be too easy to let the fragile beauty of these songs bring superficial pleasure when there is much more to be enjoyed in the poetically expressed sentiments to be found in the lyrics and I bet, now that my cynicism has passed, that Jo Mango has a much wider appeal than I posited above.
Also available as a limited edition vinyl release which, let’s be honest here, as big an artistic statement as the music. The single comes on two 10” vinyl singles with one being on black and the other on white vinyl. That’s one song per single so what, I hear you say, is on the other sides? Well, and not seen since the eighties even by an avid vinyl junkie like myself, there is an engraving on the vinyl surface following the design of the poster also enclosed with the singles. It is a truly a thing of beauty that is more than enough reason to give up food for a week just so that you can own a copy.
The vinyl release is available from the Lo-Five Records website.