Album review: Julia Jacklin – Crushing
Julia Jacklin makes music for “used to”s – she sings of places we used to live, people we used to love, people we used to be. When the Sydney-born singer/songwriter released her first album Don’t Let the Kids Win in 2016, it was immediately clear that she had a talent for shaping the hazy, confusing feelings of growing up into music that is gentle and resolute at the same time. On that album, both Jacklin’s voice and her lyrics captured the essence of wistfulness and spun it into lullabies. Vulnerability is a strength in Jacklin’s hands — she transports us to an emotional space that feels almost invasive, like walking into a bedroom where someone once slept.
Don’t Let the Kids Win led us into that room by the hand; Jacklin’s sophomore album Crushing shoves us onto the bed with its blunt exploration of the emotional arc of a breakup. Like its subject matter, Crushing’s production forsakes polish for exposure, allowing us to hear the full texture of Jacklin’s voice. Every waver, rasp, and most importantly, breath, is audible.
The album begins with a track blatantly titled “Body,” a five-minute long song that gives emotional freedom a corporeal sensation. “Body” expresses the visceral relief of leaving a worn out relationship. “I felt the changing of the seasons/all of my senses rushing back to me,” Jacklin sings over a sharp snare drumbeat and soft guitar, describing the moments after breaking up with her lover on an airport runway. Jacklin asks her ex to “watch her turn her own head,” revelling in the act of reclaiming herself. There’s other celebratory moments like this on the album, moments in which Jacklin delights in her newfound physical autonomy: in “Head Alone,” she shouts “I raised my body up to be mine” before tossing off a triumphant “ha” that lands like a hip cock.
But the novelty of a breakup wears off, and Jacklin’s left to grapple with her residual love for her ex as the pendulum swings from confidence to longing and back again. In “Pressure to Party,” a frantic, up-tempo song she calls her “three-minute scream,” she allows each clichéd expectation of a new single woman to overwhelm her, questioning even the joyful freedom she found on the previous two tracks. A rebound, for example, isn’t fun. It’s just another box to tick: “Pressure to feel fine after the fact/ out on the dance floor with my body back/ meeting a stranger, touching his face/ I don’t want anyone to ever take your place.”
The through-line in Crushing’s ten tracks is brutal honesty – honesty Jacklin doesn’t pretty up or try to universalise. There’s no hiding behind general statements. The particulars are affecting, like in the wistful “Don’t Know How to Keep Loving You,” when she considers working on her skin to re-amp a love gone stale. Or on “When the Family Flies In,” when Jacklin, backed by piano, wonders if “you ever watched” an “irrelevant music video” she sent. (An irrelevant music video is a refreshingly lame dying breath for a relationship – this stuff is never as poetic as you want it to be.) “Comfort,” the album’s last, waltzing track, does what its title promises, though not to its wished-for target. “Don’t know how you’re doing/ but that’s what I get/ I can’t be the one to hold you when I was the one/ who left,” she reminds herself. But it doesn’t feel like a reproof. It feels, as does the rest of the album, like the kind of shattering wisdom that you’re lucky if you can scrape from the hurt of a heartbreak.
Review by Bessie Rubinstein.
Crushing is out now through Liberation Records. You can buy it here.
Julia is touring Aus, the UK, Europe and the US over the next few months. Details at http://www.juliajacklin.com/
