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Before ska, rocksteady, reggae, or dub, there was mento. The Jamaican musical style grew from an encounter between African and European traditions, and its banjos, guitars, hand percussion, and rumba boxes accompanied dancing, drinking, storytelling, and songs about life’s daily irritations. But 70 years after its heyday, mento’s place in Caribbean popular music has now become marginal, as the global prominence of styles that came after mento has tended to make the earlier genre seem like merely a prelude.
June McDoom’s debut album, Follow the Light, is a revivification of mento as well as a memento of her family history. Her grandfather, Colin Smith, was a professional mento musician who played banjo and built rumba boxes. As a child, McDoom absorbed the music when she saw him perform at family parties; at the same time, she was developing a musical consciousness of her own through listening to folk music, with Simon & Garfunkel among her early favorites. On Follow the Light, she marries her inherited and acquired musical traditions with style, grace, and ingenuity.
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McDoom’s songs find a resonance between Jamaican styles, especially dub and mento, and the forms that emerged from ’70s folk as it mutated into acid folk, prog, and psychedelia. Rather than preserving folk’s association with the acoustic and the nontechnological, McDoom exposes its sounds to dub’s electronic manipulation, cracking open the arrangements with spring reverb and spongy synths—a smart way to ensure the songs don’t become a goofy folk period piece.
Working with her frequent collaborator Evan Wright, McDoom builds her arrangements from nylon-string guitar and voice. Her acid-folk and chamber-pop influences supply harp, flute, harpsichord, and strings, while the Jamaican influences bring low frequencies, echo, and electronic manipulation to her organic sounds. The resulting sensorium never sounds overly fussy or strained for virtuosity.
The opening of “Human Angel” offers a compact demonstration of these adjoining sounds. An oscillating dub siren sounds against the chime of a triangle and crackling waves pitched to loud white noise. The long spaces between deep, melodic bass notes create a syncopated pulse. This genealogical crosshatching gives Follow the Light its interest.
“Dream Dub” brings this musical argument into its clearest focus. Dub’s classic elements are present in the bass and drum groove, the offbeat accents and the play of echo, but McDoom balances them carefully against her sonorous voice. When the rhythm section drops away, her voice hangs among flute, synthesiser, and reverberation; when the rhythm returns, the bass feels newly physical.
McDoom is mostly more reverent toward her acid-folk references than her Jamaican ones. Her voice has a clear affinity with Vashti Bunyan’s, possessing a maternal warmth and formal poise that can sound tender without becoming mannered. Where Bunyan’s music has the reassurance of the most beautiful nursery rhyme, McDoom’s moves with an ebb and flow. Less like the last cup of warm milk before bed, it’s more like that violent jolt that tells you you’re finally about to sleep. While her sense of softness and dreaminess is sustained across the album, her arrangements never become inert.
“Grandpa,” a particular highlight, is also the most literal encounter with McDoom’s exploration of her family history. McDoom initially considered covering an older song, but instead wrote something for her grandfather. He appears through a voice note sent by her father from Florida. His voice, captured on an iPhone microphone, is strikingly deep, a rumble beneath McDoom’s sweetly lilting delivery.
The song’s directness is characteristic of McDoom’s lyrics. She is winningly simple in her writing, writing straightforward declarations like, “I know that I have caused you pain/Reflecting now that you are so far away” on “Without You” and “I went away to my mother’s/She always worried for me” on “Outside the Window.”
In “Memory,” that simplicity allows her to consider the question of inheritance candidly. The guitar is at its most elementary, leaving the song’s statements exposed. McDoom sings of what she has been taught and what she carries forward: “my bloodline and truth,” she sings, bringing her grandfather’s music forward to meet the traditions she’s now developing for herself.
