Rating: 8

Mumford & Sons is both a gift and a curse. They revitalized public perception of folk music and made it popular again. In the early 2010s, everybody was making folk music, which inevitably means many people were making it poorly.

It seemed every prom king with a trendy haircut stumbled into an acoustic guitar and tried to express himself, but acoustic guitar and a melody isn’t folk music: it’s a part, but not the entirety. It needs heart. Not mass-produced Hallmark heart, but real feeling, a pained poignancy or joyous jubilation that serves as the thread preventing the sweater from falling apart.

Swedish singer-songwriter José González has been around for a few years longer than Mumford & Sons, so he is in no way a part of the wave of groups riding the ripples caused by their massive impact. But he knows how to make folk that feels important, actually better than Mumford & Sons does, or at the very least, in a distinct way.

While the English four-piece use bluegrass instrumentation to produce U2-sized stadium epics, González is decidedly more scaled down, but only in perceived size. His voice is soft and instrumentation sparse, but he uses what he has efficiently.

Folk music presents an important challenge: making each song stand out despite using two or three instruments at most, while also making the tracks work in context of each other. “Vestiges & Claws,” González’s first album in eight years, is potpourri: an amalgamation of dried flower petals, dehydrated cranberries, foraged twigs and teacup pinecones that comes together for a united olfactory experience.

González has been relatively inactive the past few years, but it seems he’s been watching his rising contemporaries do their thing and absorbing the best of their elements into his own style.

“Let It Carry You” has a breezy Jack Johnson island life vibe, then treads into atmospheric indie folk territory with the harmonized vocals that close the track. “With The Ink of a Ghost” comes off as a better Joshua Radin or another one of those melancholic artists Zach Braff includes in his movie and TV soundtracks. “Every Age” is akin female-led epic indie groups like Daughter and Your Friend, but intimate in a different way, more understated and less bombastic, but as impactful.

There’s a lot here, but nothing pulls too intensely in any direction to throw it off balance. Lyrically, it’s also centered. “Every age has its turn / Every branch of the tree has to learn / Learn to grow, find its way, / Make the best of this short-lived stay,” he sings in “Every Age.”

“See the migrant birds pass by / Taking off to warmer skies / Hear them singing out their songs / Tune in, realize nothing’s wrong,” he croons in “Let It Carry You.” It’s simple and without much flourish, almost charming in its vanilla-ness.

González’s return is a beautiful thing for the state of folk music. It’s been stagnant since its popularization, an unfortunate side effect of the double-edged sword of notoriety. Folk got big, more people wanted it, musicians started writing to please more people, which inevitably ends up pandering to the lowest common denominator.

But not González. He hearkens back to a time when folk was more than the guy trying to impress girls into his dorm room, back when folk didn’t simply mean unplugged. Folk, or at least popular folk, has become an awful bore as of late, but people like González are doing something about it.

Maybe he sat out all these years waiting for this tide of mediocrity to pass so his genuinely worthwhile material would be able to shine through. Regardless, his reemergence is welcomed. The last vestiges of the passing tide of mediocre folk are fading, and the claws are coming back out.