Mar. 24, 2010 - Issue #753: Zion I
n° 3
jj {recordings_bands_mg} n° 3 {/recordings_bands_mg}
Secretly Canadian, 2010
2
As I am reminded every time my mother puts on the Antony and the Johnsons record that makes up the sum total of the music she's picked up from my iTunes library, there's a fine line between challenging indie pop and sedate adult contemporary (not that I come to bury Antony). Both go for a certain sensitive (and sometimes sentimental) emotional pull, both trade almost exclusively in sounds traditionally pleasing if not outright pleasant, both have a tendency towards incorporating a certain set of worldly sounds, both tend to get elevated or dragged down on the strength of their singer, their musical arrangements generally traditional. The easy distinction could just be made between what crowd the particular artists run in, but we have enough simple stereotypes in the world, and we shouldn't let people off the hook just because they dress nice or are on the same label as Broken Social Scene.The album that brought jj to the attention of the world, n° 2, did a pretty sharp job of staying on the right side of that line. Their music there was a bit like a warm sea breeze blowing over a power line, certainly not anything that was going to kickstart hearts or dance parties, exactly, but nothing that would really kill that vibe. Their relatively rapid follow-up, released a mere nine months after, n° 3, on the other hand, has at least one song that sounds like Enya covering Sting's "Fields of Gold" ("Let Go"), and for the most part wouldn't distract from light dinner conversation in a downtown condo.
It starts promising enough. "My Life" opens with a melancholy piano that fits rather nicely with Elin Kastlander exasperatedly weary vocals. "What the hell am I doing right?" she sighs before adding a blase take on the chorus from ATC's "It Goes Around the World": it suggests the universality of young ennui as much as trying to shake off the hangover at a beach resort bar. Third track "Into The Light" also brings a spacey vibe and a welcome cool dance spirit, but not much manages to capture a similarily ambiguous or lively mood.
It's not fabulously easy to pinpoint exactly where n° 3 goes wrong as compared to its predecessor. Maybe it's just that this one wasn't given enough time to stew in its own juices: Kastlander's lilting a/b rhymes were endearing before, but here too many of them just feel vapid and ill-thought-out, even when they're not referencing radio pop, like they were placeholders and the post-it reminding them to change it fell off the lyric sheet. "I don't care what people say / I'm gonna get it anyway" Kastlander sings on "Voi Parlate, Io Gioco," though you could point to almost any of the nine songs here for equally immature sentiments and constructions.
Though it could just be that the music doesn't as readily bail her out, too. The whistling that encroaches on "Light" is about the most dynamic thing of the whole song, though it's not enough to wake up Kastlander's humming, a drowsily-picked guitar and synth textures that could have been sampled from an acupunturist's cool-down mix. That sort of vibe is not especially out of place throughout the album's running time. V
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