Junip – Black Refuge EP (2005)

Junip is a Swedish band led by the Swedish-Argentinian folk musician José Gonzales. His solo albums are hauntingly beautiful and hypnotic, filled with quiet folk songs played on a nylon string guitar. Junip has similar songwriting, but there are more instruments and the sounds are a bit bigger. I don't know if I can technically say that I own this album, because it's just a bonus CD on Junip's album Fields. Nevertheless, it's an individual CD with these songs that were released on this EP five years earlier in 2005, so I'm counting it separately on this list. The EP has just five songs and it's only 19 minutes long. This is the second EP from Junip and it does give quite a different view of the band than the more recent albums, which sound much more professional by their sounds. I kind of like the slightly lo-fi sounds on this EP though.




The album starts with the title track Black Refuge. The acoustic guitars and drums create a slightly noisy sound that you want to nod your head along to. The organs on the background, along with the electric guitars and some electronic sounds bring chaotic psychedelia to the song. Turn to the Assassin sounds like summer. The guitar-picking melody is very airy and the active drum beat and vocals just intensify that image. Official is the first song on the album that sounds a bit darker and quite a lot more like José Gonzales' solo albums. The only thing that sets it apart from his solo stuff is the haunting organ on the background, and the drums. On the solo albums, all the rhythms are also basically made with an acoustic guitar. This song, however, shows the shamanistic side of Gonzales that makes his sound so original. Chugga-Chugga is the quietest song on the album. It shows Gonzales' skills in playing classical guitar, although, this doesn't really reach the levels of his solo albums. The album ends with a cover version of Bruce Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad. If there's one thing José Gonzales really knows, it's making amazing cover songs. He has the ability to strip the original song of all the sounds and reconstruct it with his own shamanistic style.

Many of José Gonzales' music videos are appropriately shamanistic and hypnotic. The music video for Black Refuge was used as promotional material for Junip's first full-length album. It's a black and white music video with flying objects, a singing skull and the ouija board. There may not really be a story line in this video, but it's still a piece of art.

I've seen both Junip and José Gonzales play live and even though you'd probably think that this more orchestrated band would work better live, I thought his solo gig was more intimate and thus a bit more effective for me. Although, I have to also say that José Gonzales really isn't that great performer. He didn't raelly speak anything between the songs, he just played the songs and left.

Listen to the album on Spotify.