Jimmy Scott Free’s return with “Turn Back Time,” featuring the potent vocals of Kim English, is a peculiar kind of exorcism. It’s a track with a passport full of stamps—born of a Southend sensibility, aged in Barcelona, and now arriving on our shores—yet its emotional core is stuck stubbornly in a single, unchangeable moment. This is a song that tells you to dance while its lyrics confess to being paralyzed, a shimmering, euphoric cage of a memory.
There’s a strange, fossilised quality to the obsession here, as if a pang of profound longing has been perfectly preserved in amber. The thumping, soul-infused beat doesn’t bury the feeling; it polishes the amber, holding it up to the strobe light. One gets the sense that Jimmy Scott Free, after a decade of disillusionment and creative recalibration, understands this paradox intimately. He isn’t just recounting a lost love; he’s orchestrating the sound of an internal feedback loop, the beautiful, maddening hum of a thought you cannot shake.
The track’s raw energy prevents it from ever wallowing. Kim English’s voice slices through the nostalgia not with sadness, but with a vibrant, demanding ache that insists on being heard and felt. The result is less a lament and more a full-bodied haunting. It’s the sonic equivalent of spotting the face of an old lover in a crowded room, but the room is a festival tent at 2 a.m. and the face is just a trick of the light.
It feels less like a comeback and more like a continuation of a conversation that was paused mid-sentence ten years ago. How brilliant, and how terribly human, to build a dance floor right on top of your own personal glitch in time?
