When Jensen McRae released a “pre-emptive cover” of what she imagined a new Phoebe Bridgers single would sound like in 2021, it was widely received in the spirit it was written: tongue-in-cheek parody, yes, but also a sincere love letter to a songwriter whose familiar lyrical tropes of getting high and heartbroken in shopping malls and other people’s cars worked so well. Had McRae been instead tasked to send up the well-worn trademarks of a Lucy Dacus album, she could feasibly have written ‘Forever Is A Feeling’ – even if that title might have been considered a little on the nose.

Continue reading at Clash

It’s a hot, bright Friday afternoon in May when Cassandra Jenkins stops in her tracks, the overview she has been offering me on André Breton’s concept of le merveilleux coming to a halt with it. She spots something lying on the pathway that winds around Regent’s Canal, kneels down to pick it up, then becomes lost in the object for a moment; turning it over in her hands, trying to prise some of the memories it holds out of its physical shape.

“For you,” she says quietly, and reveals the treasure to me in open, cupped hands. It’s a beaten-up piece of costume jewellery embossed with diamanté stones, adorned with a pattern designed to resemble intertwining leaves. It is, by any evaluation, a sumptuously tacky piece of crap, and I adore it. I slip the ring into my pocket, and we both take a moment to try and recall why we’re here, what we were talking about, which direction we were travelling, how much time has elapsed since the last literal or conceptual detour, and so on.

Continue reading at Clash

In Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Sea Of Tranquility, a glitch in reality causes several moments across time to converge into one: the green of a forest, the whoosh of a lunar airport, a violin coda dragged across centuries. The effect on characters is a hallucinatory sense of dislocation caused by inhabiting multiple emotional and physical time zones at once, a kind of cosmic jetlag. Julie Byrne’s third album, ‘The Greater Wings’, arrives similarly bound by the weight of its own past and future, fixed at two of the same looping, interlocking entry points.

Continue reading at Clash

It is Dacus who claims the album’s most gorgeous moments though, dripping in the kind of heartache that arrives charcoal-black in both its sorrow and humour. ‘True Blue’ and ‘We’re In Love’ find her lingering over the incidentals that puncture her lyrical scenes: leaky faucets, trash TV, pink carnations pinned to lapels, Octobers yet to come. Across an album that attempts to corral three distinct talents into one cohesive statement, it’s here that ‘the record’ truly shines: neither entirely sincere nor tongue-in-cheek, but a piece of art that elevates their points of collision.

Continue reading at Clash

Mart Avi hasn’t explicitly denied being at large in 18th century Japan, but let’s not rule anything out. After all, not only does the Estonian musician carry the air of a foppish time-traveller – the belted coat and sweeping fringe of a man who once declared he was “born in 1991, but it’s as if I come from the 50s” befitting a Tallinn-based Doctor Who remake – but he’s evidently familiar with Samurai philosopher Yamamoto Tsunetomo.

Continue reading at Clash