Album Review: Julia Jacklin - Crushing
For someone with only one album and one EP previously under her belt, Australian singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin seems to have a lot to write about. Yet for every interesting anecdote or sad story she pens, painfully absent is any musical distinction from the ocean of her peers. Crushing straddles this line a bit too often for its own good, perpetually dangling at the precipice personified in the contrast between its slower, more melodic folk tracks and the upbeat groove of its indie rock moments. Despite the immense lyrical talent enveloping every song here, the production never feels particularly compelling, a hindrance that becomes all the more apparent the longer the record goes on.
Very rarely do lyrics ever sound so raw yet fantastical, in that all-too-painful realization that Jacklin is spelling out her experiences with the barest hint of artistic license that makes her introspection all the more compelling. Sure, the opener Body could be called merely a breakup song mixed with a sense of female autonomy, but when she describes the freedom of cutting off a poisonous lover as "That's when the sound came in/I could finally see/I felt the changing of the seasons/All of my senses rushing back to me", it becomes something much more.
This idea of feeling comfort or discomfort in one's own skin is a recurring theme throughout the record, introduced on the first track and reinforced as soon as the next one begins with "Give me a full length mirror/So I can see the whole picture/My head alone gives nothing away". In her more vulnerable moments, the doubts inherent to falling out of love manifest as physical ones, as on Don't Know How to Keep Loving You with the desperate offer to wash all the imperfections away: "I could scrub until I am red, hot, weak, and thin". Between such brutal honesty, the uniquely memorable hook, and a rare moment of virtuosity in a guitar solo, the song is an instant standout.
As the album plods along and the folk aspects of the record become more prevalent, the magic begins to slowly fade out of an increasing reliance on production that simply offers too little. When The Family Flies In is a sparse piano ballad, bare in its chords and, for once, in its words as well. Convention, by contrast, is almost too specific, to the point where any melancholy conveyed gets lost amid the need to throw out irrelevant one-liners on top of dull, unchanging guitar strumming. Not that witty lines like "Started listening to your favourite band/The night I stopped listening to you" on You Were Right are ever missing, but that track also has the benefit of more than one instrument to pick up any slack.
At times Crushing feels like a densely packed experience, and at times Julia Jacklin comes off as rushing from one feeling to the next without enough time spent in the present. Without hooks or melodies to latch onto, listeners might struggle to pay attention to what is going on within the album's tracks, to hear every intricacy woven into the lyrics. Her artistry in defined by these juxtapositions, as a singer-songwriter whose music is submerged underneath her influences and yet whose words are so disturbingly personal they could only have come from her mouth. But if one was to wade through the mire of bland, uniform indie folk albums, at least this one is actually worth its salt when it comes to abstract melancholy.
6.5/10
Favourite Tracks: Body, You Were Right, Don't Know How to Keep Loving You
https://open.spotify.com/album/7ASzNryXcbX1b2INwPQCU1?si=m7VOxduoQ8yQyYsoVEiE6Q