“It’s not enough to hate the world we live within,” Young Jesus’ John Rossiter sings on the opening track of their new album, The Whole Thing Is Just There. On one level, the line could be said to be something of a credo for the new record, their second on Saddle Creek after last year’s reissue of the self-titled release, picking up as it does from its predecessor’s outlines.
After the earnest indie rock of Home, Rossiter turned toward the fictional for Grow / Decompose, a concept album of creeping dread and ensnaring complexity, before a move to California signaled a clear demarcation in the Young Jesus catalogue. The first release from the new base, the self-titled record could be viewed both as an attempt to recenter the personal and immediate within the Young Jesus sound, while also circumventing the conventions and tropes of the indie rock genre through sprawling free-form soundscapes. As we wrote in our review:
As ever, the questions Rossiter and co. raise are too big to expect any sort of clear answer, but Young Jesus offer a model of coping, a way to remain hopeful and human within their jaws. Both the lyrics and instrumentation preach a kind of relinquishment, a cessation of over-analysis and self-reflexive thinking in favour of something more natural, even if the space feels empty or alien. Push forward instinctively, they seem to be saying. Push forward with doubt.
If S/T turned toward an experimental, improvisational direction, then The Whole Thing Is Just There marches headlong forwards—earnest lyrics and musical plasticity as the symbol of a band now cured from chronic over-analysis and self-reflexive tendencies.
But that is only one level. Because, to state the obvious, Young Jesus exist in the contemporary moment. Which means that a simple reversion to earnestness is not possible. There is no Irony-Sincerity switch to flip, no clear path to authenticity. Rather, in order to retrieve some semblance of honest connection, the past and present must be negotiated and utilised, shaped into a new idea of communication.
Indeed, for all of its progressive thinking and bright hope, ‘Deterritory’ is actually a great lurching thing laden with something close to doom. Dark and heavy and marked by a tangible presence, the instrumentation is near enough the antithesis of Rossiter’s sentiments—the crushingly tangible reality that must be faced by the nebulous immaterial of good intentions.
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‘Saganism vs. Buddhism’ takes this on more directly, and in doing so picks up irony once again. “I have begun contacting various mystics,” Rossiter sings, dry as a bone. “I have begun buying rocks from stores.” He appears to be all to aware of the image he is casting, moving to California and embracing a new (age) spontaneity. As described previously, any contemporary attempt to re-salvage sincerity cannot survive without an appreciation of the moment we are within. Nowadays, a conscious effort does not make make you a more sincere person, but rather the Sincere Person—someone, hair bleached by the Californian sun, with a newfound belief in yoga, kombucha and the power of deep meditation.
It makes little difference, of course, whether you drink slime or spend a little time in your own company, or indeed whether such practices offer genuine rewards. It is not the reality that is important, but rather the image. No matter how honest or noble your intentions, an abrupt shift into pure earnestness will always appear hollow and phony, at least from the outside. As with the self-titled album, Young Jesus attempt to circumvent this by remaining as fluid and pliant as possible, not staying still long enough to be steam-rollered into a one-dimensional thing—If you keep moving, then you can never be seen as a flat image.
Which explains the improvisation of the record. ‘Fourth Zone of Gaits’ is a restrained track of tidal rhythms, Rossiter’s vocals vulnerable yet for the most part steady in their delivery, as though finding some peace in the natural cadence. That said, the track flows into ‘Bell’, another track concerned with organic cycles and imagery, though this time tending toward climactic breakdown. Where the previous track remained regular and steadfast in its patterns, ‘Bell’ finds itself accelerating into unhinged crescendos, the vocals too rising into yells as the stormy disorder descends.
The lyrics for both tracks are poetry in its most abstract sense, words and phrases linked not by their explicit collective meaning but their feel and shape, the intuitive links only a human mind can unfurl. It is essentially the meditation idea turned inside out—not limiting expression in the hope of finding personal truth, but rather letting the personal truth dictate the expression in the moment.
‘For Nana’ is perhaps the clearest realisation of this, extending the imagery of the previous songs but chiselling it into a more specific and personal shape. After being present for the death of his grandmother, Rossiter returned to his bandmates and friends to record what is perhaps their most sincere track to date. “I won’t see you anymore,” Rossiter sings simply, over and over, the instrumentation rising around him as though conjured not by the band but the present moment, coming as close as possible to fully realising Young Jesus’ impossible aims.
I won’t see you anymore
life’s a fit of moving on
blood and breath will leave you sore
salt and water drift toward
rest a reverence is born
I will dream you other forms
live your love without reward
hold you empty in my arms
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The sense of freedom and improvisation continues into closer ‘Gulf’, though as interesting and visceral as it is, the song represents a denaturing of the near-mystical achievement of its predecessor. Indeed, clocking in at over twenty minutes long, it’s tempting to view the song as a return to irony once more, a mammoth wink that acknowledges the dangers inherent to such a free-form style, and the thin line between nourishing sincerity and vapid self-indulgence.
How do you adopt a more sincere, hopeful position without becoming a flat Sincere, Hopeful Person, and everything that image entails? Young Jesus have put their hope in a spontaneous, endlessly recursive form of questioning, where every hard fought answer only exists to be questioned further. The endeavour might well take a life time, but the prospect of circling closer to the truth is something of a solution in its own right. So, while it’s tempting to think that the true message or meaning of the songs on The Whole Thing Is Just There is always just out of frame, the reality is in fact the other way around. The message of the songs is that meaning is always just out of frame, and that there is no more valuable an enterprise than the constant search outside and beyond.
The Whole Thing Is Just There is out now via Saddle Creek and you can get it from the Young Jesus Bandcamp page.
