Whatever jaded pretensions you think you’ve been permanently sealed into, they’re not permanent. Armored in irony and solipsism, we’ve become experts at shielding ourselves against simple emotions, and the possibility of ever again having to feel or acknowledge them. But when you hear something as barely laid as what Joshua Bartholomew is dealing out on his first full-length— a double album of expertly crafted pop balladry entitled And So It Begins— you find all those defenses, under the right light, are so thin they’re see-through.

Oh, you resist. The word love appears in three song titles. Love? What is that? People still sing of that? Yes, sometimes they do. It’s like being drawn out of a cave, leaving the sedentary comforts of a hibernation that has gone on a few seasons too long, blinking into the sun, and starting to remember old lives, old selves. At least, that’s true for those of us who have forgotten.

Bartholomew, a multi-instrumentalist and soulful singer of stratospheric range, is a one-man show of impressive vision, having performed, produced, and engineered all twenty songs on the album. The production value is stunning. In fact, that the songs sound as rich as they do is pretty amazing— every layer of sound possesses the complexity and attention to detail you’d expect to find from a full band. The songs contain genuine climaxes, frequently soaring to Muse-like levels of catharsis, though without the baggage of all the spacey histrionics and dread.

The music is incredibly sweet, straightforward and disarming. On a song like “River Song,” for example, through simple generalizations and the gradual swell of its arrangement— euphoria starts to set in around the three-minute mark as the harmonies indeed ripple over each other like sun dapple on a body of water— you realize the spell is irresistible. If you are not closing your eyes and drifting away as the lyrics suggest, you imagine for a moment that you could. The arrangement is both rich and traditional with subtle shades of invention that keep it from sounding rehashed.

The melodies throughout are both simple and deceptively strong: take the vocal lines that lie over the comforting, wash-cycle tempo of the guitars on the arena-ready “One Man,” or the subtlely Smiths-tinged “Think Twice,” with a delirious falsetto outro that very nearly goes too far, leaving the listener gasping for breath. There are indeed many tweaks in style as Bartholomew draws (both musically and vocally) from different influences– those rooted in pop, rock, soul and country. There’s even a bit of music hall on the Queen-flavored “Do you Know How Much I Love You” and some almost-totally-out-of-place funk-lite rock in “Charlatan.”

This is also a flaw: the price of these little diversions over such a long run time is that the listener can feel lost, searching for a center. The Nightside disc contains the bolder material, while the Dayside disc is loaded with the majority of the album’s pure ballads. I suppose this is a thematic choice, but from a listener’s perspective this choice will likely lead to one disc or the other falling into purgatory. It’s a harsh truth that even the finest double albums suffer this phenomenon over time; digital media formats and iPODS have helped matters, forgoing the physical limitations of CDs, but a little diversity in the allocation of songs can also do wonders.

This of course goes hand-in-hand with the second flaw: the length itself. And So It Begins is perhaps the wrong name for the album. On one hand the title alludes to the fact that the release serves as an introduction to an impressive talent; but in another sense it’s a colossal understatement. As it progresses you get the sense that the album is all-encompassing; an almost encyclopedic profusion of material with a running time of almost an hour and twenty-three minutes, spanning two discs, and sampling so many moods that the finished product feels more like a compendium than an introduction. What is the scope of “it” if this is only the beginning? It’s simply a lot to take in, and regardless of how strong the material might be, “kill your darlings” is not a phrase that should circulate exclusively among writers of fiction.

But these are quibbles. If an overabundance of good songs is the biggest problem to be had, the future is bright. It may not be an earth-shattering reconfiguring of the plates beneath the pop music landscape, but it isn’t trying to be. It is an oasis of enormous talent and emotion, and to experience it through a good pair of headphones is to be immersed. If Bartholomew is not trying to take us to uncharted areas of the map, he reminds us of a course that has forever been true.

Joshua Bartholomew’s website:
www.joshuabartholomew.com