“How low  / are you willing to go / before you reach all / your selfish goals?”

The question is laid bare at the very outset of the album, and is repeated in spirit for its half-hour length to one extent or another under a web of deft acoustic melodies. How gently it infiltrates, the questioning of authority and challenging of broken ideas.

It’s the stoic conviction that makes this so appealing. Jose is a quiet and to-the-point singer, his voice unadorned but insistent. When he sings, “Put down your sword / send home your dogs,” it does not come across as the the words of a yearning pacifist: he’s speaking as a shaman, soothing you, compelling you. Each song builds on an earthen simplicity that grows and richens, sometimes into something that is close to overwhelming– take for example his cover of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop,” or album closer “Cycling Trivialities.” Each starts off as a breeze and grows into an unstoppable force, guitar arpeggios that seem as immutable as nature.

Still, it’s no hippie picnic. The question first posed returns in many forms, a constant turmoil under the surface of all this superficial beauty, and it’s that dynamic of release and restraint that seems to move the album forward, elevating it from ordinary to peculiar and powerful; backed by nothing but the occasional light percussion and the undisguised ambience of the guitar (and player– the songs are occasionally punctuated by yawns, groans, and impatient sighs), Jose seems to be delivering fewer words than he’d like to, as if– given the right cirumstances– he could vent with a fair degree of vitriol. “What’s the point / if you hate / die / and kill for love?” he sings on “Killing for Love.” It’s another set of lines that could easily be misconstrued as idealized fluff. But when Jose delivers the lines, they ring with the a certain kind of controlled despair. We should all know this by now.