Jackie Leven – Oh What A Blow That Phantom Dealt Me! – Cooking Vinyl (in: korte recensies…)

In the Dutch online magazine’s roundup of ‘short reviews’, under the heading ‘Lyrical singer-songwriter’, there is a brief and enthusiastic notice. Jackie Leven has for years been making “one little masterpiece after another” without visibly impressing a large audience – which is “a bit strange”, since he writes beautiful lyrical songs about misery and sorrow, sings them in a warm, deep, soulful voice that is “heart-rendingly beautiful”, and also provides magnificent arrangements combining folk with jazz, blues, rock and soul.

Anyone who discovers Leven, the reviewer says, awaits each next album with longing and is never disappointed: each time there is a new, inspired album of an hour, and one feels the creative stream is flowing as fiercely as ever. The latest too is highly poetic, and again he has invited friends who feel the melancholy mood perfectly: Johnny Dowd is the perfect second voice, even when he merely reads a poem. “Romanticism lives in Leven” – a pun on his name – and the listener is once more carried away and moved. Rating: four and a half stars.