It was in 1996 that Jay-Jay Johanson, a young man  from a cold climate, fascinated by the Bristol sound  they called trip-hop and Portishead in particular,  first tapped delicately on our eardrums. 

The intoxicating album that definitively put this rare  and elegant Swede on the map was called Whiskey.  It was the beginning of an enthralling adventure.  In only a few songs he revealed a family tree that  spread its roots far and wide: on one branch Lee  Hazlewood, or pop from Talk Talk or Nilsson,  on the other John Coltrane with Johnny Hartman,  and a whole army of calm jazz or symphonic  recordings sampled from everywhere imaginable.  Almost 20 years later he has returned with an  incredible new album.

This new release is called  Opium and it contains the very essence of Johanson’s  music: an ease with inventing melodies, a voice that  gently caresses, and the jacked up, heady rhythms  that lift and carry the songs. From the peaceful  harmonica opening of Drowsy / Too Young To Say  Good Night to the smoke-wreathed love song I Don’t  Know Much About Loving, via titles with a sporadic  and light groove (NDE, Alone Too Long), Opium is  a courageous offering. Johanson opens his heart with  fearlessness and modesty, gracefully lowering his  guard and evoking the questions that torment men of  his age: love, solitude, immaturity. The songwriting  is unerring, the words have a suppressed poetry.

This  new Johanson is the work of a guy who has survived  the avalanches, who is no longer looking for answers  and is content to sketch out the perspectives in as  many songs. Some titles are serious (Harakiri), but  others immediately take up the reins casting a more  gentle, peaceful light, like Scarecrow, a collaboration  with Robin Guthrie that would not have sounded  out of place on a Cocteau Twins album, or of the  strange positivity of Be Yourself or I Love Him So. 

The strength of Opium is that it asks questions that  don’t necessarily have an answer; it offers a collection  of songs freed from any certitude but which convince  through their modesty, through their precision. 

In short, Jay-Jay at his best.