Whilst her previous album Crushing was more of an intimate breakup album than anything else, 32-year-old Australian indie rock artist Julia Jacklin’s third album, Pre Pleasure, delves back into her past to explore the links between religion and sexual shame; love and loss; and relationships and individuality.
Two alternating, distorted piano chords and muffled electronic drums launch you into “Lydia Wears A Cross”, a flawless intro song, and the lead single for the record. Brimming with her experience of Catholic primary school in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, the song is shrouded in nostalgic moments like praying for Princess Diana and listening to Lloyd Webber musicals. However, it has a dark undercurrent, exploring the early experiences of conflict between her atheistic home and religious schooling, with lines like, “The bleeding heart divided”, showing the remembered confusion of being told one thing at home and another at the school assemblies of her childhood. “Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me / Go on, now you try it”, lines still imprinted in her memory from the time, are perhaps an origin point for a lifelong sense of shame and guilt around her sexuality. Lyrically, Jacklin is not afraid to switch up the metre of her verse, keeping it fresh with faster syllabic passages that add rhythm to the sparse texture of the opening. As the song progresses, the addition of an electric guitar countermelody, distorted so it almost sounds as if it is being bowed like a cello, adds a huge amount of depth in the lower frequencies of the song, helping it explode out of its narrow sounding opening. When the bass and live drums come in, it just becomes euphoric: all the heavy, sentimental, questioning beauty of this first track culminating in a final minute of overlapping ostinatoes and synth arpeggios, before petering out to gentle, reverb-drenched piano.
These themes are explored further on “Ignore Tenderness”, where Jacklin sings about how she sometimes has difficulty achieving sexual pleasure even when watching pornography. Jacklin notes, “Right when the pleasure begins / My education creeps in”, hinting at lingering sexual repression from her Catholic schooling. To me, this repression is emphasised by the chorus lines, “Beneath the sheets, you’re just a cave / A plastic bucket, or a gravе”, which seem almost devoid of pleasure. Notwithstanding this, “Ignore Tenderness” does have optimism shining through, with the confident lines, “But leave no room for doubt / That you are brave”, which she sings as the murky verse opens up a brighter chorus, with tasteful drum fills leading the ear to light orchestral strings that complement her arching vocal lines.
Looking at the album as a whole, the production on Pre Pleasure is really what makes it such a captivating listen. In an attempt to move away from the intimate, often sparse soundworld of Crushing, which saw her setting boundaries and reclaiming her autonomy in the wake of a crumbled relationship, Jacklin approached her third album differently. She chose to write Pre Pleasure entirely on keyboard rather than guitar, and also to work with a new co-producer Marcus Paquin, who has produced for Arcade Fire and The Weather Station amongst others. Paquin is well versed in using specific instrumental techniques to set the mood for a song and in overlapping musical lines to create thick, dynamic textures which firmly underpin vocals. This record therefore has a fuller sound to it than Jacklin’s previous work, even incorporating orchestral string arrangements written by Canadian composer Owen Pallett on two tracks. However, regardless of a new producer, Pre Pleasure is just as Julia Jacklin as ever: with her sound reminiscent of previous singer-songwriters like Gillian Welch or Leonard Cohen, and fitting easily alongside her contemporary friends Phoebe Bridgers, Stella Donnelly, Lucy Dacus, and Lana Del Rey – Jacklin even guesting at live shows of the latter two in the past.
The mood-setting production style of Jacklin and Paquin working together is quite striking on the track, “Love, Try Not To Let Go”. Piano and simmering smoky guitar sit above gently pushing bass and simple drums, creating an open and serious mood for the song, which reflects upon the regrets of her youth and present loneliness: “The echo of my hometown / The things I never said / Consumes the space between me / And everyone I left”. All the yearning for the past comes together for the sudden, short, but loud chorus, with punishing guitar and drums underneath her repeated mantra-like, “Try not to let go”.
Jacklin’s songs often come across as hugely personal, lullaby-esque, soothing self-affirmations. “Comfort”, the closing number on her second album, Crushing, is a model example of her self-reassuring songwriting, with phrases like, “You’ll be okay / You’ll be alright / You’ll get well soon / Sleep through the night”. On Pre Pleasure, a similar lyrical energy can be seen in a couple of tracks. The majority of “I Was Neon”, is taken up by the question “Am I gonna lose myself again?” repeated over and over as a self-reflecting metaphor referring to how we change over time. Jacklin goes on to sing, “I quite like the person that I am”, showing a reticence to change from her familiar self, and when repeated, feels as though she is clawing on to her former traits. The song carries all the emotional anticipation of wondering who the new you is going to be, yet with the fear of losing what makes you who you are. Over the course of the track, the harmony underneath the repeated, “again?”, changes. Initially, her vocal harmonies isolate a chord borrowed from another key, which feels unsettled and questioning, but later the harmony shifts to become more and more grounded, giving the impression that by repeating the question to herself she has found peace with it. Also, on “Magic”, Jacklin shares the positive affirmations, “I won’t feel ashamed tonight”, and “I will feel adored tonight / Ignore intrusive thoughts tonight”. Complemented by a delicate, whispered vocal delivery, and interspersed with her soft humming, it is as if the song is more sung to herself rather than her listeners, adding to the feeling of intimacy gleaned from the album.
A tragically sad love song, “Too In Love To Die”, is a personal highlight of the album. Jacklin channels into the deeply romantic fear of losing someone you love. Huge amounts of beauty can be found throughout the song: the yearning soft organ opening, gradually crescendoing with gentle acoustic guitar and backing vocal harmonies, before fading back out to leave you with “surely it’s love like this that keeps us alive”, a phrase sung as a half-statement-half-question, which somehow lingers with you for the rest of the album. Ideas of love and loss return on a later track, “Be Careful With Yourself”, this time a little more tongue-in-cheek. In an almost complete reversal of the bitter, post-breakup enmity she sings with on Crushing, Jacklin lists things that could end a successful relationship with the hope that they will not occur, singing, “Please stop smoking, want your life to last a long time / If you don’t stop smoking, I’ll have to start, shorten mine / When you go driving, would you stick to the limit? / I’m making plans for my future and I plan on you being in it”.
Across the second half of the album, Jacklin develops motifs of loneliness and complex relationships with family and fame. “Less Of A Stranger” unpacks Jacklin’s personal yet relatable struggles of communicating with her mother, and the emotional difficulty of loving someone the way that they are, whilst still wishing that they could fully understand the hardships you have been through. The following track, “Moviegoer”, does have some of the more interesting instrumentation on the album, with clarinet and sax joining to thicken out her vocal harmonies and meandering melodies, but this serves to give the track an odd sense of life which is quite the opposite of the lyrics therein. The song deals with issues of Jacklin’s own increasing stardom through the metaphor of the film industry. She sings, “Movie director is going down too / Forty million dollars, still nobody loves you”, reflecting her own increasing loneliness as a solo singer-songwriter, despite her rising fame.
With the final song, “End Of A Friendship”, Jacklin sees Pre Pleasure out with a bang: a massive crescendo, full of dense orchestral strings playing cleansing arpeggios with a muffled lead guitar solo that gradually morphs into plaintive screaming deep within the texture of the piece. It’s unusual to hear songs about friendships falling apart, and without the title, you’d be forgiven if you thought it was another romantic breakup song, but it would be foolish to think that our love should be restricted solely to romantic partners. The album closes on the outstandingly poetic, “But all my words are caught up in a cloud / You know someday you’ll have to say them out loud”, an unabating, poignant thought that stays with you during the final intense playout. A potent end to a powerfully reflective album.
Favourites: “Lydia Wears A Cross”, “I Was Neon”, “Too In Love To Die”
Least Favourite: “Moviegoer”