All signs point to Durand Jones & The Indications, Lead Album

Feted Indiana soul revivalists embrace the dancefloor and survey a nation in crisis on timeless, irresistible third album. By Stevie Chick. Illustration by Panik.

Durand Jones & The Indications ★★★★ Private Space SECRETLY CANADIAN. CD/DL/LP

IF THE PAST is indeed a foreign country, then Durand Jones & The Indications are such regular visitors that they no longer have to show their passports at immigration. Certainly, they’ve spent long enough there to have adopted the local customs and to be able to pass themselves off as natives.

Forming almost a decade ago while students at Jacobs School Of Music in Bloomington, Indiana, Jones and his bandmates were united by a love for classic soul and R&B. Theirs was no casual, passing fancy. Their two previous albums, 2016’s self-titled debut and 2019’s American Love Call, reveal a painstaking ear for the vernacular and technique of the soul music of half-a-century ago. This ability is in part down to their uncanny approximation of era-appropriate arrangements and production methods, achieving a level of verisimilitude that places them in the lineage of soul revivalists stretching back from Sharon Jones and the Daptone movement, to Amy Winehouse’s

Back To Black (the commercial apex and acme of this sound), and beyond. So eerie is their feel for period detail, these albums conjured images of Lee Mavers of The La’s’ quixotic (and possibly apocryphal) search for studio gear thick with “authentic ’60s dust”.

But Jones and his Indications’ gift goes deeper than mere technique and technical wizardry. Their songwriting is supple, natural, never audibly reaching for a vibe it can’t achieve; their loving approach ensures their tunes never feel like pastiches of old styles. And their two main vocalists span enough of a spectrum that their harmonies are able to conjure the sound of classic vocal groups like The Stylistics and The Delfonics, Jones’s deeper, warmer, stronger tones playing off drummer Aaron Frazer’s higherregister, gossamer-light vocals.

Their third album suggests they are aware that this backwards focus might soon have become a cul-de-sac. The group have responded by embracing more contemporary influences – but only relatively. Over the page, Jones cites disco and “bedroom R&B” as Private Space’s key sonic reference points, and the album depicts the Indications shaking loose the bonds of 1974 to enter the headily futuristic realm that was 1977. But only a churl would grumble over the unabashedly retro nature of music as sweetly satisfying and as soulfully nourishing as this. The Indications apply their characteristic ear for detail to the disco era on Witchoo, a shout-out to the Chicano low-rider community that was the first to support them. The track seduces with the interplay between Jones and Frazer, the foursquare thump of the bass drum and the rasp of the hi-hat, and an ambience that feels more dancefloor than recording studio, the background whoops, hollers and handclaps evoking the infectious party of Marvin Gaye’s Got To Give It Up. The Indications do disco as well as they did Philly soul.

Disco isn’t the only mode on Private Space, however. The title track recalls the heavy, downcast vibe of Curtis Mayfield circa Right On For The Darkness, its epic strings billowing like brooding storm clouds, while Ride Or Die is another lighterthan-air Stylistics-style devotional, peaking as it breaks down to just drums, ghostly Hammond organ purr and Frazer’s sweet, vulnerable falsetto. And while the group’s gift for ersatz sounds is keenly accurate, the songs are never hamstrung by reverence for historical accuracy. Rather, they work fresh magic from these vintage tics and flourishes, with the effect that their tunes sound numinously familiar, like unexpected, unread chapters within a beloved and well-thumbed book. This knack is best displayed on More Than Ever, which weaves together some choice elements – the staccato horn fusillades of Curtis’s Give Me Your Love, a bass line conversant with Baby This Love That I Have by Minnie Riperton, and an ecstatic third-act key change recalling Donny Hathaway’s Love, Love, Love – into an irresistible confection all its own that is perhaps the Indications’ finest song yet. This is very much “grown folk’s music”.

But while Jones and the Indications take such abundant pleasure in robing themselves in the sonic garb of yesteryear,

Private Space is very much an album about Where We’re At in 2021. The openly political content might be sparing but suggests more subtle and implicit messages woven into the fabric of their balladry. Opener Love Will Work It Out is the sole track to make these issues explicit, with its nightmarish vision of Jones wandering like Jimmy Ruffin across a land “overtaken by disease” and reeling at “modern day lynchings in the streets I call home”. Inspired by the scale of the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, this imagery is startling, purposefully unsettling, and haunts the songs that follow, inviting interpretation of their lyrics as further (albeit veiled) social commentary. The languid, beautiful Southern soul of Reach Out could be an offer of support to a beleaguered lover, but “Like a willow, you’re bending but you’ll never break” feels like a broader declaration of solidarity with the civil rights struggle. And in context of the disorienting sense of isolation wreaked by the pandemic, the title track’s dreamlike consummation of lust assumes a deeper and more profound meaning, especially when Frazer sings yearningly of being “planets apart” but still “making our escape/For a moment of ecstasy.”

Ultimately, Private Space’s message is one of hope, as spelt out by the tracks that bookend it. The closing I Can See finds the group addressing a “young world” with skies “turned to grey”, but with a faith that “The darkness of night/Gives way to new light.” And Love Will Work It Out might bear the wounds of the bleak reality of blackness in 21st century America, but it finds redemption in the messages of gospel, in believing “joy will set us free”. That opening track finds Jones reflecting on his mission to sing “some songs to heal some souls” – a lofty ambition, perhaps, but one this resonant and deeply pleasurable album achieves with grace and groove.

“Subtle messages are woven into the fabric of the balladry.”