The The gets personal on Ensoulment

It’s hard to talk about Ensoulment without marvelling at the gap between it and Johnson’s last long playing transmission, NakedSelf, released an extraordinary quarter of a century ago. At times it felt as if the silence was complete and a line had been drawn under The The’s gripping journey through darkness and light.

While absorbing Ensoulment it’s worth recalling Johnson’s musical path, fractionally too young for punk but still caught up in the melee, even if a bit bored by the ‘meat and potatoes’ nature of what he heard. He was one of those working class kids who scooted through the briefly open door just in time to take advantage of the infinite possibilities of post-punk.

Each ensuing The The record felt like its own world, something that made those first couple of albums a challenge to perform live. It was a certain Johnny Marr who nudged Johnson towards touring circa Mind Bomb, but this is probably the first time that a road-tested live band has informed the sound of a The The album. Anyone who witnessed the 2018 Comeback Special shows will immediately understand what great news that is, put simply; the beautifully recorded Ensoulment makes full use of a superlative band and is rich in gothic, with a small “g”, atmosphere.

The album it most closely resembles is perhaps the Marr-assisted Dusk (although current guitarist Barrie Cadogan successfully stamps his own distinctive and fluid beauty all over Ensoulment) a record that included a key The The song, “Helpline Operator,” with its promise that, “your problems will be mine.” A line that could equally be reassurance or an acknowledgment of the inescapability of life’s universal ills, of which Johnson has had more than his fair share. Something the first The The post-comeback song, “You Can’t Stop What’s Coming,” specifically acknowledged. As night follows day it should be no surprise to find that Ensoulment doesn’t shy away from confronting raw emotions, but nevertheless finds time for wry humour in amongst the essential soul-searching - much like life itself.

It must be a source of some relief to Johnson to realise that, as a young man, in The The he created an entity that would lend itself perfectly to exploring the arc of a life and the bitter and the sweet of living and ageing.

A skill put to good use here via the laconic twinkle of “Some Days I Drink My Coffee by the Grave of William Blake” which sees Matt ambling through Bunhill Fields cemetery ruefully acknowledging the shifting city around him, his familiar baritone comforting and soothing amidst the relentless change. That it’s followed by the wry twisted boogie of “Zen & the Art of Dating” reconfirms Johnson’s ability to shift swiftly from the personal to the political or to just erase the boundaries altogether, if they ever existed. However, as we shall see, it’s also a warning of Ensoulment’s occasional flaws.

No such flaws marr the jazzy and desolate nostalgic reverie of “Down by the Frozen River,” it’s tale of a working class child escaping destiny, a showcase for DC Collard’s stunning piano. Or the crooked rockabilly deployed, on “I Hope You Remember (The Things I Can’t Forget), to confront the monetisation of our attention and every corner of our fugitive minds. Along the way Johnson reminds us that there’s little more evocative than, “the autumnal lights of October and November.”

But it’s not all a straightforward triumph. Our fraught reality does mean that the lyrics of opener “Cognitive Dissident” give cause for concern when considered against Johnson’s disappointing dalliance with COVID conspiracy theories; musically it's an effective track but lyrically leaves a little unintentional(?) unease in its wake, the paranoia feeling uncomfortably close to comments left on a dodgy Facebook page. Once he could have pulled it off but now it feels clunky and a little embarrassing, maybe the times have simply changed? The same problem rears its awkward head again elsewhere on Ensoulment. To question everything makes sense, but what happens when the answers are wrong or place you in a much less pleasant ‘herd’ than the one you deride?

Far better to consider the universal resonance of “Where Do We Go When We Die?” or the deep sense of wistful melancholy that runs through the elegiac “A Rainy Day in May,” where a chance meeting on a train is the stepping off point for a consideration of life’s random nature, with all those possible journeys left untraveled. Johnson wordlessly serenades us as the band plays out over the final credits. A reminder that sometimes the personal hits harder and lasts longer than anything else.