Just a couple of months after he released his first album and started his solo career, Josh Klinghoffer pursues his musical journey under the pseudonym Pluralone. In this early days of fall, he has just revealed a second album closely linked to the current worldwide crisis, named in a very telling way: I Don’t Feel Well.

2020 is clearly a dark year. Over the past few months, one must state that we have been put through the mill. Despite the surrounding slump, shadows sometimes vanished to give way to disseminated sunny spells – quite rare yet all the more precious. Pluralone‘s second album I Don’t Feel Well is definitely one of those. However, this new disk — tinged with a fragile beauty —is scarred by a tormented time marked by a series of crisis along with the lasting trauma it engendered.

Unlike its predecessor To Be One With You, which had been composed and recorded over ten years, this new album carries all the immediacy and emergency of a year when nothing happened as planned. Pluralone himself would not be the one to deny it. While he was thrilled to open Pearl Jam‘s American tour on his own, he was eventually compelled to reconsider his plans when an already divided America was stroke with full force by fires on the West Coast and — obviously — by the pandemic that has been hitting the whole planet for several months now. An inevitable break that led him to compose and record a disk in one go, in a few weeks only, for the first time ever in his yet quite active career.

For — if we may say so — this unprecedented crisis gives a golden opportunity: the occasion to take time. Finally. To isolate ourselves from the chaos to take our temperature and to devote ourselves to an inner journey in the far reaches of our beings. This is the premise of this album. It is food for heart and soul:  to gauge the pulse of the world — and ours at the same time — and to understand what surrounds us in order to be able to listen to ourselves. A therapy-album that traces back the feelings of an extraordinarily sensitive man, and leads to this essential question: how do I feel? So then, to a painful yet life-saving answer, I Don’t Feel Well.

If this new album is actually essentially linked to the tumult we lived with all year long, it is nonetheless neither dark nor tearful. Quite the opposite. That is even what we look for in Pluralone’s music: this ability to find light in the darkness, and to make it shine through smooth and ethereal melodies that arouse within us this powerful yet melancholic feeling. The Californian seems to have found the right method, always guided by an inspired piano that stands as a setting for his magnificent falsetto voice.

The ten tracks that compose this second long form are indeed in line with To Be One With You through their atmosphere and construction. We can find flimsy songs with silky arrangements such as Knowing You or the splendid Carry whose evolution surprises the ear as it conquers it. These moments are adroitly counterbalanced by more rhythmic tracks, with a more dynamic writing along with catchy chorus such as Red Don’t Feel and The Night Won’t Scare Me. These songs that open the album are marked with typical processes of Josh Klinghoffer’s music as chord progression and rhythmic variations. Maybe a bit bolder henceforth, Pluralone does not refrain himself from exploring unexpected territories. The Report — a firm favorite on this album — surprises with the RnB influences of its introduction and with a more experimental chorus. As for Mother’s Nature, it gives prominence to a sharp guitar to make out of its text a rallying cry in favor of the preservation of our planet. Eventually, by way of epilogue to a piece that brought us as much tears as hope, Pluralone finally surrenders to a particularly touching piano-and-vocals song, accompanied only by a few cords. The song I Hear You is a moment of sharing, whose title is the echo of a familiar voice that we would like to open up to.

I Don’t Feel Well is a true Band-Aid album for its composer. However, it remains an outstretched hand, a welcomed comfort in this troubled period. With this in mind, indeed, Klinghoffer explained the genesis of the album, shortly after its release: “At some point along the way, I asked myself why I do this, and I guess once admitting that there was a desire to try to make the world a little better place — if I can believe that writing songs is me doing that — I can feel it’s OK. So often I’m embarrassed to imagine for a second that anything I’m doing could do such a thing, but that negative thinking… is not helpful. Even though a lot of the world right now seems to feed and thrive off a constant diet of negativity, disgust and anger, I tried to remind myself that I really want to make something people might find beautiful. If it came anywhere close to doing what music I love does for me, then not only am I grateful and honored, but I’m maybe, in a little teeny tiny way, doing what I set out to.”

A delicate attention that Josh has endeavored to carry on since the first lockdown by offering stripped and personal live versions of his most beautiful songs. They always come with a thought or a short note that let us catch a glimpse of a personality as inspiring as his music can be.

Thanks Josh. Thanks for that, and everything else!

English translation : Claire Pinault.

Paul Mougeot

Pratiquant assidu du headbang nonchalant en milieu festif. Je dégaine mon stylo entre deux mouvements de tête.