Jon McKiel’s life and music changed forever when he bought a haunted reel-to-reel. When the equipment arrived at his home in rural New Brunswick, the singer-songwriter discovered a tape still wound into the machine, full of odd song fragments and guitar noodlings recorded by its previous owner. Who was he? When did he make those recordings? What dreams did he have for his music? Nobody could say. McKiel and his co-producer Jay Crocker (better known as JOYFULTALK) dubbed the anonymous artist Bobby Joe Hope, welcomed him as a full collaborator, and even named the subsequent album after him. The songs on 2020’s Bobby Joe Hope sampled snippets of his unfinished songs into unusual sound collages that disrupted McKiel’s solid, if familiar, guitar rock and inspired him to work new sounds and styles into his repertoire.
Hope doesn’t appear on Hex, but the ghost of his ghost lingers. McKiel and Crocker have further refined their recombinant techniques, only this time they sample McKiel himself, assembling his own studio experiments into unusual amalgams of blues, dub, soul, folk, tropicália, and more. The songs are compellingly disorienting; their melodies are as tight as the grooves are strange—hypnotic, slightly off. McKiel and Crocker continually blur the distinction between live performance and manipulated recording. “String,” which sounds like Paul Simon lost in the Bush of Ghosts, layers a crisp guitar over a slightly distorted one, their melodic lines twining together. It’s like listening to someone play along to the stereo in the next room, and in its uncanniness the moment is both unsettling and unexpectedly beautiful.
Everything on Hex seems both familiar and foreign. The title track stacks a distorted and truncated guitar lick over a busy bassline and a drumbeat that sounds like it’s been borrowed from a ’90s rap sample of a ’60s jazz tune, but it’s the free-floating saxophone that tilts the song just off its axis. The jangly pomp of “Everlee” is so recognizable as a Byrds reference that you might get that right-on-the-tip-of-your-tongue frustration from trying to name the tune. Closer “Memory Screen Pt. 2” warps a breezy guitar strum until it nearly breaks, then descends into windswept collage of guitar distortion, disembodied voices, and what might be whalesong, or static off an EVP mic. Each tinkers with a different idea, deploys voice and guitar toward new ends, yet they all fit together like puzzle pieces.
Otherworldly as it often sounds, Hex is primarily concerned with the fate of this world. McKiel’s cover of “Concrete Sea,” by Terry Jacks (an underrated singer-songwriter as well as an environmental activist), presents the city as an environment unfit for humans: “No one is meant to be living here in a concrete sea,” he chants. “Everyone, including me, wishes he could be set free.” McKiel resents the erasure of wonder, the mundane encroaching on everyday magic—a timely concern now that bands are proudly using AI to write songs. McKiel finds humanity in a bit of confusion, and on this oddly affecting album he comes across as a medium, closely attuned to the unknown and unknowable as he deciphers missives from another plane.
