“Let me give, let me talk, let me live in your pillow / Kill your fear, whisper words in your ear,” Jordan Klassen intones reassuringly on “Go to Me.” Slipping easily between intimacy and grandiosity, the track is the first single from Repentance, the British Columbian singer-songwriter’s forthcoming album on Toronto label Nevado. That “Go to Me” was also the initial cut on Klassen’s 2012 EP, Kindness, and LP, Monastery, shouldn’t bother you—it’s that solid, elliptical lyrics and all.
Interviewed by a Vancouver newspaper in June, Klassen listed as his chief influences Belle and Sebastian, Paul Simon, Joanna Newsom, Nick Drake, Radiohead and Sufjan Stevens. You’d have guessed as much from spinning Repentance, a clutch of memorable tunes gently intoned by the singer, and whimsically adorned by producer Jonathan Anderson with ukulele, glockenspiel, toy piano, parade drums and whistling. Klassen’s writing earned him early cred, but comparing his fledgling self-releases with the imaginative refinement of Repentance, you hear the distance from aspiration to inspiration.—Steve Smith
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