Review
Arriving four years after Pre Pleasure and marking her inaugural release on 4AD, Julia Jacklin’s fourth LP takes root in Melbourne’s inner-north pub culture, tracked inside a loft directly above a Collingwood watering hole. Having scrapped an earlier, rushed batch of recordings, she recalibrated her pace alongside producer Robert Muiños, letting local camaraderie and the physical bleed of the neighborhood dictate the session's tone.
That grounding yields an unvarnished, lived-in band sound. On "God Sometimes," a low keyboard drone gathers momentum into a prickly duel between overdriven electric guitar and electric piano, counterbalancing the breezy bounce and snappy snare work of "Get Away From Me (I Think I'll Love You Soon)." Jacklin repeatedly offsets the rhythm section's kinetic push with sudden vacuums of space: "Angel Vision" strips down to dry acoustic strumming, while the spare piano of "You Turned On The Tap" yields to "Walk On Me," which detonates into serrated guitar feedback and heavy tom fills before receding into the hushed, close-mic vocal harmonies of "I Wish."
