Jim Keller “End of the World”

Soul-infused rock with slick musicianship that conveys a timely message of hope.

The world may be ending, but singer-songwriter Jim Keller is pretty OK with the whole thing; that’s if the title track from his seventh album, “End of the World”, is anything to go by anyway. “No more fighting, no more pain,” he sings in a tone that can only be described as joyous, against a backdrop that features everything from pedal steel to marimba. “No more calling everybody names / Nothing but red skies day after day / Nobody talking when they got nothin’ to say.” Which, like the album, sounds pretty good indeed.

Optimism in the face of hardship is something of a theme throughout the record, and that’s demonstrated no where better than on the infectiously uplifting ‘Love One Another’ as Keller insists that, no matter the trials and tribulations faced, “All we got to do is love one another”, before he wisely asserts that the key tenets in life we should all have are “respect, dignity, kindness, compassion, forgiveness” and “empathy”. The funk-laden ‘Got No Time For That’ finds him, rather relatability, grappling with modern life in the form of the “ship of fools” that run the world, but also social media like “X, TikTok and Instagram”.

‘Sally Come Home’ takes a sensitive look at a soldier struggling with PTSD (“When Sally had come home from the war / The whispers said she’s not like before”), while on ‘I Want to Go Back Home’, a song that almost verges on being a ballad, Keller’s voice is heavy with emotion as he longs for the impossibility of returning to the past (“Oh I’d give everything I own / If I could just turn back the time / I want to go back home”). “A smile on my face, a skip in my step / Don’t move too fast, but I got no regrets,” opens the breezy, funk-lite ‘Here I Am’, the story of a drifter all too happy to live his life like a proverbial rolling stone, but on ‘Pretending’ we find Keller living in denial as that’s the only way for him to keep going (“So do not wake me, just let me be / And I’ll keep on dreaming that you’re in love with me”).

Imbued with the tenderness and sentiment that its title suggests, ‘Sweetness’ – featuring an unusual, but oddly effective Casio keyboard solo – sees Keller reflecting sadly on a relationship now sour and wishing for the tenderness that was once shared: “You’re a million miles away / Is it her that’s crawled into your mind? / And am I a fool to think that she won’t stay?” The blistering ‘Lucky’ bursts with twanging electric guitar and contagious positivity as it lists the ways things always turn out rosy, but the piano-heavy ‘Getting Over You’ finds Keller in a far more subdued mood as he struggles to move on from a relationship that ended years earlier.

The way things are going, it doesn’t seem such a stretch to imagine we might indeed be facing the end of the world, but hopefully, it’s still some way off. Regardless, Keller has some wisdom that will be useful no matter what the future holds: “So drink that wine up and watch the river flow / Feel the sand work up in between your toes / Telling every secret that anybody knows / Cause it don’t make no difference / When it’s all gonna blow.”