Upcoming Release: Jesse DeNatale’s new album “The Hands of Time”

Jesse DeNatale’s new album “The Hands of Time,” is in a word, reverential.  It is at times, symphonic and at other times pulsing forward with a rawness and power of rhythm he says stems from his Mexican/Italian roots. The California native says when it came to this record, it was about cutting through the noise, not over-planning the production, but rather chasing the mystery and weaving all he has learned about being human with what he describes as a new, thinner and fragile reality that is in a kind of recovery-mode from the pandemic.

This new release comes out in a time of social desperation, the great battle of good versus evil, a time where reality itself has lost all cohesion, information has become untrustworthy, and while it is happening, people are deferring to artificial intelligence to cobble together bizarre assemblages that have the gawkers gawking, but leave the soulful cold.

But soul is what this album and its songs are made of. You can feel and hear it on every track.  DeNatale masterfully brings forth his humanity while pointing lovingly at ours. You can feel it the details, in the sweeping violins, in the rhythms that carry you along. Nothing is over-bearing, everything is where it’s meant to be, a richness of texture, at times pleading, at times full of gratitude, an album that searches for and finds equilibrium in the fragments of living, of thinking and feeling.

Some albums try to ride the zeitgeist of our times, embodying the urgency and anxiety of it.  “The Hands of Time” comes in the form of the medicinal antidote, reminding you of all that is eternal and of the spirit, deeply reflective and reverent toward the art of living, to help us find our way. Though the ten songs on the record range in topic, from love, (Love Is) and gratitude (The Hands of Time), to sorrow and to the horrors of gun violence (Stop This World), It's the notion of time itself, with its power and irreversibility, that appears in every song.

A follow up to 2020’s “The Wilderness” the new album relies on musical forms he grew up with in the 60s that convey to him innocence and hope, a simplicity he says gets to the heart of things more easily, getting from the “me” to the “you” most directly, DeNatale made this a conscious musical choice. It was a way of offering optimism after all that the world has been through, something so hard and overwhelming, to try and remind himself and others what kind of forces exist, the good and the bad, and perhaps most importantly, the force of time.