“Only the wind can pull my body / Close to the mystery.” So go the eponymous lyrics of Jackie West‘s upcoming album Closer to the Mystery, coming soon via Ruination Record Co. Back in March we described the album as one “made in the hope of edging closer to the truth at the heart of any relationship,” developing West’s decidedly ambiguous style of songwriting and thus resisting the temptation to settle for easy clichés. Take single ‘Tiny Flowers ii’, a song marked by a warm fondness undercut by its own refrain in which West sings, “I don’t fall in love like that anymore.” “The line,” as we put it, “complicates the second listen and every one thereafter, its gravity subverting the track’s structure and perspective from what the sound might originally suggest.”
The album follows a protagonist through a city in the aftermath of a relationship, the various rented rooms in which they find themselves representative of those liminal days between what was and what will be. The progression through these spaces unfolds with an uneven pace, with songs like ‘Snow Amplified’ capturing time’s habit of turning strange during life’s significant moments. Maddeningly slow at one minute, vertiginously quick the next. The mood is achieved via Jackie West’s fluid, genre-hopping style, with elements of folk, pop, shoegaze, bossa nova and R&B all reached for at various points with an intuitive sense of craft. The result is a sound as shifting and nebulous as the days it works to conjure, threatening to settle and solidify at any given moment as the future decides itself and the path is revealed.
Finding the protagonist gazing from a window, alone in a stranger’s apartment, opening track and latest single ‘End of the World’ serves as aa great introduction to the record’s circumstances and mood. A person caught in the slipstream of opposing forces, be that between the past and the future, or the bustling world and the dead air of an empty room. Fingerpicked guitar anchors the track within the quiet present, while orchestral swells dapple the edges like memories or possibilities suggesting themselves amid the stillness. But instead of tracing these elements towards the root, Jackie West instead lets them shoot and shimmer across the frame. Content to understand change as a kind of potential, and occupy the present in all of its fluctuating strangeness.
