JORJA CHALMERS

Midnight Train ITALIANS DO IT BETTER

Australian multi-instrumentalist’s enigmatic electronic nocturnes.

The key to unlocking Jorja Chalmers’ stellar second album is stamped in its title. Midnight Train isn’t so much a late-night record as an utterly nocturnal one, hovering somewhere in the dead hours of the early morning, where time and sound warp and stretch each other.

The Australian-born, Margate-based musician has pedigree as Bryan Ferry’s saxophonist and keyboard player, but there’s no trace of her employer’s artfully poised supper club jazz here. Instead, these 13 tracks are shaped by Chalmers’ love of Vangelis, Goblin, Brian Eno and Berlinera Bowie – artists who mould song structures like clay and conjure atmospheres from nothing.

Spectral keyboards and electronic effects ebb and pulse through Bring Me Down and Rabbit In The Headlights, melodies flicker like neon signs on the periphery of vision and tempos sometimes subtly warp to enhance the feeling of disorientation. Her saxophone is used sparingly, and when it is deployed, it’s not so much for purposes of indulgent instrumental showboating as to add texture, atmosphere and colour, albeit mostly in shades of black.

Almost half of these songs are instrumental. When she does sing, Chalmers’ voice matches the mood perfectly: lowkey and mesmerising on I’ll Be Waiting, skeletal but bold on the comparatively upbeat Rhapsody. Most striking is the title track, a vocal hall of mirrors that lays on the reverb so thick that it’s difficult to work out where the echoes end and the voice begins, before it shifts into an instrumental second half that could be a gothic Tangerine Dream.

Chalmers wrote Midnight Train late at night, after she put her children to bed, which explains its hushed ambience.

It’s too fleshed out to be truly minimalist, but she still makes a lot out of very little. In someone else’s hands, standout track The Wolves Of The Orangery might be an art pop belter. In hers, it’s otherworldly and hypnotic, a warm hallucination of a tune that sticks around long after the lights have come up. The sole misstep is her cover of The Doors’ Riders On The Storm: even slowed down to the pace of a heartbeat, the sheer familiarity of the original punctures the reverie she’s created on either side of it.

Tellingly, the album was mixed by David Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley, and it shares the same sense of dreamlike disconnection as the cult director’s darkest and most enigmatic works, Lost Highway and Inland Empire.

But Midnight Train isn’t so much the soundtrack to a film that has yet to be made, as one for a movie half-seen, halfdreamed at some unearthly hour.

THE SOUNDTRACK TO A MOVIE HALF-SEEN, HALF-DREAMED.