As we wrote in a post back in March, Brooklyn-based Canadian Jesse Marchant (formerly known as JBM) has this summer released a new album, Antelope Running. Released via AntiFragile Music, the album sees Marchant continue with his distinctively haunting and emotionally expressive style. It draws on both memories of the past and hopes for the future, all the while framed by the tumult and uncertainty of the present.
Opening track ‘Hard to Say the Meaning’ grounds this perspective from the off. Fond and reflective and melancholic too, memories told with poetic detail, sharp edges sanded down by time. “I remember I missed you that night after a call from back home,” Marchant sings. “Michelle almost died but chose living / At dusk I walked in the pink / and looped ‘Ambulance Blues’ until the batteries died.”
‘Go Lightly’ follows with a heady mix of yearning and despair, before the synth-based ‘An Accident {from 3 perspectives}’ injects poppier sensibilities. Rooted in seething synthesizer, the song captures the curious interplay of haze and hyperawareness that comes with trauma, the titular accident rendered with genuine urgency. And if that song is positioned clearly in the present, ‘Dirty Snow’ inverts the style, its warm and sombre style facing up to past and future struggles with a sense of defiant hope.
The song was built from a recycled piano line that Marchant first wrote over four years ago, the morning after Trump won the 2016 election. “Almost 4 years later I found myself at the same piano, in the same studio, recording the finished version,” Marchant describes. “With three of the members from the last session, I was feeling a deep sense of gratitude for our reunion and for the rich contributions they were making to my new songs, along with a feeling of hope for all that might change for the better. In my life and in the world around me.”
I hope the ground we’re on
Will quit sinking
And that bright leaves
Lead us from the dark
And fireflies open my heart
I hope the dirty snow
Will melt soon
It’s this ability to play with time that makes Jesse Marchant such an evocative songwriter. The ability to transport the listener back to some momentous personal event while retaining a sense of distance too. The creeping sadness latent in all memories. The fact they’re never coming back. This sensation is loaded in the patient dappled synth of the title track and the nostalgic school dance drum machine of ‘The Steam Rushes On’, not to mention the arpeggiating guitar that makes up so many of the song structures. Where Antelope Running stands apart is how it treats such a feeling. How it finds no solution amid the reflections. No epiphany on how to live a life. Just a competing balance of fondness, longing and regret. An ongoing process of losing and gaining and losing again.
Antelope Running is out now and you can get in from the Jesse Marchant webstore.