Jon Toogood – Last of the Lonely Gods (Warner NZ) 13th Floor Album Review

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In 2014, Shihad released FVEY, a raging record addressing social justice issues that were deeply etched in its loud tracks. Now, right on a decade later, front man Jon Toogood offers a very different, and solo, song cycle.

It’s an album that perhaps, if not already used by Bob Marley, could have been titled Redemption Songs. No longer railing against spy networks and inequality, Last of the Lonely Gods sees Toogood taking a mid-life stock-take and surfacing feelings of both loss and joy.

The songs are memorable and melodic but nuanced enough not to be obvious.  Opener Lost in My Hometown sees Toogood back in the Wellington he moved away from. Yes, that looking back to ‘towns’ of one’s upbringing has been explored before (Simon & Garfunkel’s My Little Town, Bruce Springsteen’s My Home Town), but this song is engaging for its localism and restlessness. He’s drifting down the same old streets of my childhood memories…time is frozen, getting lost in my hometown.  The first of twelve songs looking back in order to look forward.

The anthemic Shouldn’t Leave it Like That follows. A challenge to racism, sexism, other  -isms, but with the added exhortation to make it personal. If FVEY was about causes, this is about being real. An update on Dave Dobbyn’s Welcome Home almost. Love is for the brave. It’s enough to conquer hate, he sings.  Hey what’s your name, I saw you just the other day. It’s as if in his 50s, Toogood’s crossed that threshold into realising you can’t change the world but you can change yourself and in so doing make the world a better place.

Title track, Last of the Lonely Gods, is set against lone piano and is an ode to a friend. It offers a nudge to move on, to be that caterpillar and risk the change towards being a butterfly. Let go of the ego and things will start to turn around. Strings enter, offering a doleful backing that goes with grieving the need to change and move on. A growing up when you’re already grown-up song.

The jaunty Gravity is the first single and understandably so with catchy rhythm and a clear message about the inevitability of – metaphorically – falling before standing up and moving on. Shades of the Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne song Free Fallin, perhaps. Truism it may be but there’s  no escaping gravity and no avoiding the falls before returning to some semblance of balance. This is a musician who has not only mastered the craft of songwriting but mastered the art of seeing wisdom in the human journey.

Love is Forever is a remembrance of losing his mother.  To add to the angst, Toogood was detained in a Melbourne lockdown while she was dying in Wellington. He had to say goodbye by phone. Yet ever one to see beauty in the unbearable, he notes his mother living on through the vitality of his young daughter. Nothing maudlin here, yet a painfully personal song. A window into a grief that perhaps more of us have known than have spoken about publicly.

Its back to a catchier rhythm on Us Against the World and the stark honesty of lyrics continue. A grief that feels like theft and a wondering if one can carry on. Yet a knowing that in the darkness of loss it’s time to turn your ship around. Here the songwriter reflects on the perverse redemption of death through (re)recognising the need to carry on stronger and supported by loved ones.

Grief of course is tidal; it sweeps back in like a wave when least expected. In a third song exploring this loss Toogood sings atop pulsing keyboard tones (perhaps a sonic reference to the tinnitus that plagued him after Covid) , I wish I could dive like a swallow at the river’s edge (Swallow Song).  So begins an acknowledgement of how the natural world offers balm in times of grief.

The Best You Can adopts a third-person narrative and in clearly enunciated vocals against beautiful guitar picking he sings of the resolve to be a better man, commitment to family and reaching the point of no longer being able to fool oneself. Redemption again. That sense of life adrift until the gift of love’s full embrace is found. The human and the spiritual deeply entwined. This is knowing balladry from a man who knows.

Maybe it was Your Heart covers the domain of conscience – what weighs us down and what keeps us up at night. Belief in something and perhaps some Being greater than oneself. The album closes with Missing Paradise. An ode to loss and separation, another lockdown song celebrating (if that’s the word?) the unexpected good that can come of times of isolation, an enforced version of that ancient tradition of retreat in austere surrounds.

This a collection coloured by raw honesty and truths about the human journey. Thematically, there are reminders of Bruce Cockburn or Steve Earle. Or Neil Finn’s Out of Silence. But in this case it’s borne out of noise. While some will hanker for the high volume of Shihad, this gentle cycle of songs, writ through with loss, is a powerful celebration of healing and redemption.

Robin Kearns

Jon Toogood’s Last Of The Lonely Gods is released Friday, October 11th.  Click here to Pre-Order

Click here to watch the 13th Floor MusicTalk interview with Jon Toogood

 

 

Robin Kearns
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