Cinematic Music Goes Down Under: The Jezabels
Cinematic Music Goes Down Under: The Jezabels
In 1989, when I was in ninth grade, Lawrence of Arabia was rereleased in theaters, and my best friends Dave and Christo and I saw it not once, but twice, sitting in the front row at one screening and happily craning our necks to best funnel the broad desert escapades into our puny, gaping-open eyes. We were being inadvertently initiated into the common, modern experience of cinematic awe, that emotion that can only be experienced in a dark theater with a film that seems to loom over the audience, demanding respect on a scale no other artistic medium can manage. And that’s what I mean by Cinematic here. (In this column at least; future columns will explore different facets of that word. In fact, two years later, in the same theater in Emeryville, CA, for extra credit in my French class I watched La Belle Noiseuse, a 238 minute depiction of an old painter reworking his nude study of a young lady over and over – and I learned something completely new about the cinematic experience).
Like many people my age (early ‘40s), my first forays into the movie theater were Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, and the odd juvenile comedy, all of which I found fun, but it wasn’t until I saw Lawrence of Arabia that it suddenly clicked: There is a kind of spiritual surrender available in those dark auditoriums, a self-abnegation in the face of a bright, projected Cloud of Unknowing. I don’t mean incomprehension; I mean an aesthetic experience that requires us to open everything up and let it flow in, rather than leaning forward to follow it along. And that’s the kind of music I’ll be talking about today: A band whose expansive sound makes me feel like I’m at the movies, even when I’m just stuck in traffic in my tiny car.
The Jezabels ― composed of Hayley Mary on vocals and lyrics, Heather Shannon on keyboards, Samuel Lockwood on guitar, and Nik Kaloper on drums ― formed at the University of Sydney in 2007. While many of their songs do have catchy hooks (from “Disco Biscuit Love” on their first e.p., 2009’s The Man Is Dead, on up to “If Ya Want Me” on their latest album, 2016’s Synthia), overall they specialize more in richly-textured sonic ambiance than in the verse-chorus-verse school of songwriting. I bought a used book of prints of paintings by Mark Rothko the other day, to cut up for collages, and it dawned on me that those beautifully belabored swathes of color are the fine art equivalent of what The Jezabels layer for our ears in the recording studio. Yet, even that analogy makes their music seem too flat. If I had synesthesia, their songs would make me see not just a Color Field painting ― throbbing with an odd juxtaposition, such as cardinal red above charcoal black ― but also the swooping arcs of a trapeze artist or the lines strung between telephone poles, as seen from the backseat of the car on a remembered family vacation.
That last analogy is especially pertinent, because, during these times fraught with discussions of whether we’re being inundated with too much nostalgia ― or at least too much of the shoehorned-in, ineffective kind ― The Jezabels’ sound doesn’t so much rely on elements of 1980s music, so much as it invokes them with a righteous, witchy magic that simply can’t be questioned, because of the superior quality of the songs that result. In a nutshell, The Jezabels sound like Kate Bush, The Cocteau Twins, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, as filtered through a variety of other ‘80s bands’ key characteristics, from Gene Loves Jezebel’s crunchy guitar licks (“The End”) to the programmed backing tracks favored by the Eurythmics and the Pet Shop Boys (“Unnatural”). But the whole point to this essay is the fact that The Jezabels’ sound can’t fit in a nutshell; it can’t even fit in a normal-sized room. It evokes the big screen, yes, but in a way that pushes against the edges of even that envelope.
Oddly, the ‘80s band that comes to my mind the most, when I try and pinpoint the je ne sais quois quality that unifies all those disparate sounds, is U2. First, because Lockwood’s guitar work ― shifting from clear riffs to drawn-out, honey-toned tremolos ― recalls that of The Edge. More specifically, though, I’m thinking of the first and second albums U2 put out with Brian Eno as their producer: The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. Strangely, it was after Eno left Roxy Music that that band began putting out more and more ethereal music (culminating in the suave, smooth-listening classic Avalon, which was recorded during the same time period that Eno was collaborating with David Byrne on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which overlaid samples of US radio broadcasts on top of chopped up African music), yet as a producer in the ‘80’s it was “ethereal” that came to define his influence, less than, say, “fragmented and avant garde.” (That is, at least until he helped U2 create Achtung Baby, which Bono famously described as “four men chopping down The Joshua Tree”).[1] But this is likely due to his less-visible, frequent producing partner: Daniel Lanois. Whereas Eno’s solo works sound like compilations from an experimental music festival, Lanois’s solo works (especially 1993’s sublime For the Beauty of Wynona) are of a piece with the transcendent sounds on other artists’ albums that he’s helped to produce.
In this sense, then, the Australian music producer Lachlan Mitchell should be considered an honorary fifth member of The Jezabels, for ― as the producer of all but one of their releases (2014’s The Brink) ― he has been as crucial to synthesizing the disparate elements of their sound into an ethereal yet tectonic whole as Eno/Lanois were, when U2 called them in to help on their follow-up to 1983’s popular yet musically unambitious album War. Consider that Mary and Shannon began, back in high school, as a guitar-and-violin folk duo, while Kaloper, their future drummer, was into speed metal. In the same 2011 profile of The Jezabels in “The Weekend Australian” where I learned that, Kaloper notes that Lachlan Mitchell himself played in a black metal band, and that helped him forge their music into “very grandiose, expansive soundscapes.” Guitarist Lockwood echoes this, saying, “Lachlan’s really good at directing things and letting them get as big as they can get.”[2]
The band itself aren’t the only ones who beat me to it, when it comes to the way I’m describing their sound. DaveyBoy, reviewing their 2011 album Prisoner for the website sputnikmusic, cites its “cinematic nature.”[3] And, over at xsnoize, Sandra Blemster actually closes her review of The Jezabels’ most recent release this way: “On listening to Synthia I feel like I’ve paid a visit to the cinema and watched a gripping, extraordinary film. You know when a film captures you that much and you come out, and it’s daylight and your eyes hurt from the sun? That’s how this album felt.”[4]
In a sense, The Jezabels have worn this characteristic on their sleeve from the start, giving early songs names that evoke the old school version of “cinematic,” the daunting literary concept of the sublime: “Deep Wide Ocean,” “Long Highway,” “Dark Storm,” and so on.
“Dark Storm” ― which is my favorite song of theirs for long stretches, alternating with “Hurt Me” and, to be honest, numerous others ― is as good a place as any to dive into a case study. You can find it on YouTube here.
Go ahead and Google the lyrics to “Dark Storm” and try to convince me you know what in the world Hayley Mary is singing about. Is it a coy tale of drug addiction, á la Elliot Smith, or is it a tale of heartbreak ― or is it simply a barely-connected string of impressionistic musings? But that doesn’t really matter, because the lyrics’ inscrutability only adds to the titular dark wash of the song. The odd phrases that rise up here or there (“That would swallow all my love/I fell beneath the company/And now I sleep in a bed of blood/Down in the deep, the rolling sea”) serve less as segments of communicated meaning than as vivid paint strokes on a canvas that seems to grow right before our ears. At times, Mary’s voice swoops up and down and then down again, reminding me of those lines between telephone poles, as seen from a family vacation car, or of the waves of light hitting a movie theater screen at 24 frames per second.
Speaking of projection, their song “Time to Dance” is almost an onomatopoeia depiction of the film screening experience, from the flicker sound at the beginning to the cathartic, successive waves of sonic light that roll across our ears by the end. You can find it on YouTube here.
Opening with a build-up of some of Lockwood’s Edge-like delicate plucking, the instrumentation of “Time to Dance” echoes Mary’s world-weary voice and lost, defeatist lyrics (“When you work so hard/What’s the point in having all that gas?”), until a subtle shift occurs a minute and a half in, where the tiny teeth guitar notes turn into acoustic strumming for a few bars, and then suddenly we’re riding an electric guitar melody that wants to guide us to the end, like exactly the helper the song’s narrator’s been seeking. But, no, that’s not to be, because Mary’s vocals rise even higher into the foreground, as she slides back and forth from the first person to the second person, while layering assertiveness and self-confidence on top of the earlier yearning. When her voice hits that highest register with “Can you tell me when it’s time?” I just get chills. It’s like Neo swooping in to save Trinity on the freeway in Matrix Reloaded. Only the heroine is actually the female narrator here, figuring things out on her own. You want to live on in the world of her evolving story (beautifully evoked by modern dance on a rooftop in the video). Yet, soon enough, the guitar is doing a totally new thing, Chuck-a-chuck-a-ing us into a denouement, like the pan back that indicates a film’s closing credits are coming.
I’ve seen The Jezabels live twice: in 2014 at Neumos in Seattle, and then in 2016 at the Star Theater in Portland, Oregon. One thing I haven’t talked about in this article is the fact that this is currently the preeminent feminist band in the world. Never mind that they were playing venues that could only hold 1,000 people or less; and, in the case of the Portland show, only a hundred or so came out. A band like Russia’s Pussy Riot might get more publicity, when it comes to advocating for women’s issues, especially in the face of Putin’s personification of authoritarian patriarchy. But musically and lyrically that band has all the subtlety of a Soviet sledgehammer. The Jezabels, on the other hand, make art, not off-putting propaganda, and Hayley Mary writes and sings about the whole spectrum of the modern female experience with both opaque, poetic lines and direct, threatening growls. In the middle of “City Girl,” we get this beautiful verse that seems to be about menstruation: “Every month this shit gets awry/Know my body tells a story/Of the earth in all her pain and glory.” Several of their songs deal explicitly with female sexual pleasure (“Easy to Love,” “Electric Lover,” and “Pleasure Drive”). A couple others deal with the difficulties women face: “Mace Spray” is about the absurdity of having to carry around a protective device; and “Smile” lashes out at men who advise women on the street to cheer up their expression. Of course, Hayley Mary is well aware that there are overarching concerns that unite all the granular issues she sings about.
The main reason the Portland show was so sparsely attended was the fact that it took place just a couple days after Donald Trump got elected President, and that night, just a dozen blocks away, riot police were still clashing with protestors. Hayley Mary acknowledged from the stage that, if they didn’t have a show to perform, they’d be out there too. Later, I talked to her as she and her bandmates greeted fans at the front of the club. I told her my kids love to run back and forth to their music, as I blast it while washing the dishes after dinner. (Little do they know “Disco Biscuit Love,” with its driving keyboard beat, is a tale of drug-dependent affection). As we talked, rather than just signing her name on the back of the flyer I’d handed her, this Australian rock star wrote the following to my kids: “Dear Robin and Magnolia[,] You’ve been born into a hard time for humanity[.] But remember to follow your instincts and do things for the right reasons and you will help make the world better than ever. X Hayley.” Then she passed it around to her bandmates to sign, and I took it with me outside onto the sidewalk, where, even though it was a fall night, reality made my eyes ache like the sun does after they’ve been dilated for hours, from taking in a cinematic, all-consuming movie.
After opening for the reformed iconic ‘80s band Midnight Oil in the fall of 2017, then playing a few small Australian festivals, The Jezabels are currently laying low, probably getting ready to release the dates for an international tour. Their latest single “The Others” ― which can be found here ― contains the lines “And sometimes I’m inclined/To smash mirrors with my mind/For that feeling that my body ain’t a cage.” And, on a grander scale, this is precisely the power their music overall exerts: A lesson in self-projection that pushes past all constraints.
[1] http://www.laweekly.com/music/u2s-joshua-tree-tour-celebrated-the-30th-anniversary-of-their-greatest-album-8251874
[2] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/sound-destined-for-a-bigger-stage/news-story/0bf241483bea081ad2037f1000aecad0?sv=e3929d739a31a0740fcfe7bf1ba4dc7c
[3] https://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/46096/The-Jezabels-Prisoner/
[4] http://www.xsnoize.com/album-review-the-jezabels-synthia/