- Freud thought of love and death as opposing forces. Eros—the drive to live and procreate—versus Thanatos, the drive towards self-destruction. On Jabu's Sleep Heavy, these opposites have a way of getting confused. "Wounds" opens with singer Alex Rendall in the grip of infatuation: "Can't say I love her, it's too vague / She storms through my mind on a rampage." But the images soon turn deathly—"Ashes to ashes is our fate... "—and, framed by sad chords, the song starts to seem like an elegy. The confusion is there in the album title, too. Is it referring to post-coital sleep, or the final sleep of death? Jabu's inky music hints at both states. It's soundsystem pop risen shambling from the grave, or loved-up UK soul with a sickly whiff of decay.
There are moments where death wins out, like in "Tomb," or the devastating "Bones" ("It was there we placed your bones / And I couldn't bear it, 'cause it wasn't you"). Some tracks end with a strange pitched-down coda—the pop song equivalent of a death rattle—and the album's flow is broken by interludes like "Searc," in which Amos Childs' sample-led productions drift into a netherworld of crackle and hiss. These moments recall the bleak sounds of his two other Young Echo groups, Killing Sound and O$VMV$M.
But the album's best tracks are full of life. Some past Jabu records have been spoken-word—Rendall always considered it hip-hop—but here he sings in a tense blue-eyed tenor that matches the music's discomfort. And a few tweaks to Childs' minimalist beats can give them a poppy verse-chorus sweep. In bittersweet opener "Let Me Know," a halting bassline and harmonies from second singer Jasmine Butt do the trick. In "Get To You," it's inky synth strings.
These tracks, the album's most memorable, come in the first half. Later things get foggier. More of Butt's glimmering harmonies might have leavened the mood ("Lay You Down" is her only chance to shine). The one glimmer of hope is dub pop ballad "Which Way," and it's placed a few tracks before the end. The final word comes instead from "Give," a ghoulish lament addressed to an unnamed lover. "Catch me, I'm falling for you," Rendall sings. In this context it doesn't sound like a pleasant fall so much as a slow descent into the cold ground.
Tracklist01. Let Me Know
02. Tomb
03. Get To You
04. Fool If
05. Bones
06. On
07. Searc
08. Wounds
09. Which Way
10. Lay You Down
11. Give