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May 17, 2019 - Fantastic Voyage
The new Justin Jay project cheats its way into the heart immediately by having a vapor-wave album cover with horses on it. If you’re hip and online, it’s going to draw your eye, and if you’re listening to boys like Justin Jay, you’re going to consider yourself hip and online. It’s a pleasant enough trap. But it is a trap. But what I’ve just described is marketing and this is a music blog. So, let’s get on.
Dancy? Yes. If that’s all you’re looking for, smoke some drug I haven’t heard of and go to a forest or desert and whatever yourself away. Enough whippets and you can get “dancy” out of a man coughing. This is more than dancy. This is proselytizing, the good kind. It’s funk advocation in the middle featuring unproblematic unrequited-love jams, shrugging off a lot of mundane romance tribulations with earnestness that cuts like irony.
An entirely level-headed album of this caliber is a rare beast. The post-middle is a harder-stepping techno tribute which espouses joy despite the joyless state of things. In the previous sentence “things” refers to the moribund climate, the abundance of injustice, the return to populism by many unraveling liberal democracies, general events which cause one person or another to fright. And what’s more, it makes the plea through romance, clearly aware romance is no answer, but nonetheless, “make everything okay.”
JJ has struck a fine balance. Love song after love song whether themed unrequited or longing, realistically hopeless, nothing gets after it more aggressively than these starry-eyed beats. “I’ll wait for you...I know you’re out there.” It’s as easy to read from an übermensch as from a lonely boy. The raw power within these tracks is that not everything is staked on any single love, nor any single rejection or failure. “We all got a lot to learn,” may well sum up the impetus behind these songs. And rarely does something so moving contain so little pretension.
Frequently my reviews go track-by-track in search of the common thread, but everything will come together pt. I obscures nothing about itself, nothing is hidden in artistic prowess. Rather, Justin Jay pulls himself together, pulls his music together, and through that conglomeration, his hopes and intentions, his innards float straight to the surface. It’s a rare thing to find an artist as humble as to elucidate without asking to have her or his work first penetrated as an offering. Maybe it’s that the vision of what’s being created is often so unclear.
Maybe it’s the same for Justin Jay. And if that’s so, then he’s switched his approach. Rather than asking you're offering up your time, your energy, he’s offered up himself to you, inviting a deeper read by first offering what he knows he has to give. If there is more to be gleaned from everything will come together pt. I then Justin has laid flowers and snacks at the entrance to his temple. ⛰️