Teenage dreams, so hard to beat! And teenage imagination, too! Frihetens Förlag, the latest imprint to emerge from the Discreet universe, debuts with this 35 minute collection of songs from Pennsylvania's 13 year old Jayden Mont. Youth is far too often fetishised in music for my liking, but Mont's tender age proves unavoidable when understanding the music he makes. Composed from the most rudimentary of tools - a mic, a voice, a casio keyboard - and performed with an innocence so direct it cannot be manufactured any other way, Mont intuitively stumbles into the kind of Pure Expression many other artists spend a lifetime easily missing. If Mont is young, then he's also profilic too, the music featured here only a small reflection of the amount he's already released on Bandcamp, CD-r and tape. Comparisons to Daniel Johnston and Wesley Willis will circle for reasons immediately obvious on first listen, the kind of songwriting that would be art brut-ish were it not so sincere, emotional as opposed to intellectual expressions that stand unabashedly in their own light. If, like us, you consider notions of amateurism and the rudimentary as valid and inspiring as any other means of expression in art, you might just have yourself a new poster boy. As Mont says himself, "Well, it's not perfect, but it is a song". The best kind of song.
