SHORT OF A FEVER
Jungle ambient pop is infectious but can feel like the aural equivalent of a travel agency. Plus the week’s other releases
Jungle, For Ever
★★★☆☆
With their debut album as Jungle, Tom McFarland and Josh Lloyd-Watson honed a disco-funk sound that’s at once distinctive and strangely anonymous. Now a seven-piece collective, they appeal to listeners resistant to big-tent pop-house but easily sold on soul-inflected hedonism. They are, in other words, a quintessential signing to indie label XL.
Despite a four-year wait, the songs on their second album, For Ever, still sound like understudies for Mark Ronson mega-hits. On “Casio”, golden soul melodies ping along elastic beats, while “Beat 54 (All Good Now)” unfurls an opulent backdrop for sad funkateer vocals.
Jungle occasionally feel like the aural equivalent of a travel agency: their music’s insistent bounce is very accommodating, but whoever decided that each yearning falsetto should be layered up and Insta-filtered – shorn of awkward ridges and imperfections, the sound of human feeling – may be a sociopath. Even on the many delectable compositions (“Give Out”, “Cosurmyne”), the peaks are cloudy, vocals unobtrusive and charmless.
In a way, the hollowed-out ambience suits Jungle’s vision. Their milieu is cautionary party anthems about the folly of chasing cash at life’s expense. With its righteous themes and slightly muffled sonics, For Ever sometimes approximates a lost trove of Curtis Mayfield-fashioned soul. At other times it’s like walking out of a noisy club and into a smoking area full of marketing assistants denouncing their 9-to-5s.
Recording in LA seems to have rubbed off on the west Londoners. “Happy Man” takes aim at transactional enlightenment – “Buy yourself a dream, it won’t mean nothing” – while the poolside pop of “Heavy, California” laments, “I will love you, can’t afford you.”
But their most affecting songs do the least. “(More and More) It Ain’t Easy” has no real chorus, only a hypnotic hip-hop groove and a melody that sounds unfinished, as if composed from the memory of a mournful dream.
“Cherry” strikes a tone of muted rapture. “House in LA” amps up the histrionics but rebrands the California dream as an indulgent, woozy nightmare. If the emotional purview is narrow, it’s hard to complain when Jungle so steadily hit the mark, cracking out choruses that bulge and pop like overfilled balloons.
“When you smile, the world feels a little better,” they sing in the record’s opening line. As with much here, its easy positivity feels a little awkward, like a random thumbs-up from a colleague. But you believe that they believe it, and that’s enough to drift into their slipstream – even if the thrills have a habit of slipping away too soon. Jazz Monroe
Pop goths struggling to find their own niche Pale Waves, My Mind Makes Noises
On their debut album My Mind Makes Noises, Pale Waves show flashes of potential but an awful lot of mimicry.
A pop act masquerading as goths, the quartet have benefited and then suffered from a close relationship
with label mates The 1975.
Each of My Mind Make Noises’ 14 tracks follows the same format: a sprawling opening with a light smattering of synths, before a generically anthemic guitar kicks in and builds to a pivotal key change, on a chorus often consisting of just one or two lines. It’s pure 1975.
“There’s a Honey” uses the exact same vocal hook as “Television Romance” (both sounding a lot like Zedd’s track “Clarity” ft Foxes) and frontwoman Heather Baron-Gracie has a habit of recycling lyrics that grapple with vague existential angst, not to mention vocals that land more off-key than on.
Pale Waves are the victims of a music industry desperate to assert “the next big thing” in a climate where fans are more about discovery than having something forced down their throats. It’s fine to be influenced by one particular band, but they need to find their own voice or risk being known as little more than The 1975’s pale imitators. Roisin O’Connor
The Modfather still at full throttle Paul Weller, True Meanings
Most artists with 13 albums under their belt (not to mention 12 with previous bands) would be tempted to slow down. Not Paul Weller. Since 1992, the former Jam frontman has released an album at least once every three years.
True Meanings, his 14th, sees him experiment fully with orchestral elements for the first time. LP opener “The Soul Searchers” starts with Weller picking out familiar folk melodies on an acoustic guitar, but is soon decorated by dramatic, trilling strings, an intricate, finger-tapped guitar solo and a punchy Hammond organ breakdown (played by The Zombies’ Rod Argent).
“I’m never, ever too proud to give a song over to someone else, to see what they might be able to bring to it,” Weller said of his collaborative approach to songwriting. It’s a noble mantra, and makes for a record with some rich layers and embellishments, but you sense that the excess of outside influence might be making up for something.
“Bowie”, for instance, appears to be a wistful, heartfelt and personal tribute to a musical hero, but it turns out its lyrics – as is the case with three other songs – were farmed out to another songwriter. Still, True Meanings is an interesting, if not transcendent, addition to the Weller canon. Christopher Hooton
These reviews appeared in yesterday’s Independent Daily Edition