JULIA JACKLIN – THE GEM: REVIEW
JULIA JACKLIN
The Gem (4AD)
HAS ANYONE EVER BEEN so certain in her uncertainty as Julia Jacklin? So confident that she doesn’t know, that she couldn’t know how things are, so therefore must secretly know what will happen – i.e., the worst likely outcome – and yet so unwilling to believe that maybe it is this very thought that makes the prediction inevitable?
As a writer with a way to quietly slice up a character, to define and crush at the same time without leaving a mark, Jacklin sees people, but no one gets more cuts than herself, and usually it is in anticipation, in a halfway state between what has and what will. Even musically this holds, with her deliciously ambiguous songs sometimes sitting between a chugging momentum and rhythm just held back, often displaying a fondness for melodic progression that can still be pinned down by a murmuring control.
Three albums so far have shown Jacklin’s ability to talk herself out of relationships and direction, put herself on a path nonetheless, and then question whether even attempting this is a sign of the very wrongness that pervades. She has wanted to believe but couldn’t even trust herself to do that. And on The Gem we see what might be called a classic Jacklinism as she says to a putative lover “get away from me, I think I’ll love you soon” and we know exactly what she means: I want to, but then I would say that; it won’t be good, or if it is I might wreck it; so what do I know?
“You don’t have to be careful, I don’t have to be right/ You don't have to call me up, darling, if you don't come home tonight” she says with affected nonchalance in the opening lines of that brisk, even dare I say bouncy pop song (called, neatly, Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon) if you were wondering), and the death-riding of what this is or what this may be, has already begun. “There's no need to be sure that this feeling will stay/I'm just trying to ready myself for what's coming my way.” She couldn’t be more Julia Jacklin if she tried.
The intriguing thing about The Gem is that there are signs, maybe even whole directions, that Jacklin is taking it a little easier on the doomsaying, a little easier on herself. It’s not a wholesale reversal of her natural inclinations by any means, the nagging issues remain, but we’re at least looking at shadings.
In If I Had The Hand Of God she questions whether active interference is actually helpful, watching a friend on a low (maybe they need space, not advice), ponders whether doing rather than avoiding (because of whatever she might predict) can be the smart choice when it comes to calling her dad, asks herself whether she needs to be someone for everyone else. It’s not settled though, with a telling scene that is built on a repetition, with a twist, of a moment: early on, she sings “Leaning on the bar, spinning my ring/Mary sings and I feel everything”, but by song’s end Jacklin has detached herself in some way and says “Standing in the yard, trying not to drink/Mary sings and I feel nothing”.
Is that good or bad? Ah, well, is there really an answer? We don’t live alone do we? Even when we’re alone. Especially if religion, which has laced itself through all her work so far, as it did through her childhood, is if not a constant companion, then at least a regular intruder. As she asks in Angel Vision, “how to feel free with someone watching over me?”
In Angel Vision, a solemnly bare piece of neo-folk a strummed guitar accompanies Jacklin wandering through, just touching everything: ground, another (human? holy?), the discomfit. “I let you teach me things I already knew,” she says of someone whose freedom is envied, maybe: “The vines that grew, never shackled you.” She hesitates, she stays inside, but she sees why those vines may be less protective than deflecting, “blocking my view”.
Nonetheless, in the skittish electro drums and Suzanne Vega-ish delivery of Real Life, Jacklin hovers between the imagined and the real, between a musical dream state of fuzz sounds and a sense of movement in those drums, between acceptance of symbolism and rejecting interpretation. “Dreams still mean something even when you’re a dog/Are you telling me if I dreamed you into my head, I’d end up with some kind of plant instead?”
Appropriately though, the avoidance that has peppered her interactions in the past reaches an impasse in God Sometimes, that doesn’t necessarily resolve in certainty, that is instead like “try[ing] to grip onto water”. A fuzzy bit of rock whose drums stick out further than normal on her earlier albums, God Sometimes lopes through just as Jacklin’s delivery does, a combination that says you don’t have to look at me, I’m just passing, ignoring the fact we can’t help but notice. “Hold out for something greater, ah I see you as your own saviour,” she offers as the noise level increases. So, let it happen? Ah, no. “Oh you have to be a god sometimes, force the moment to change/Flip the table, then rearrange.”
Sure. Maybe. Why not? I dunno. You reckon? Who knows?
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