Joji - Nectar

September 25, 2020 - 88rising

Whoa. Joji’s learned a lot since Ballads.

Still a little too romantic for twenty-twenty.

It’s clear how horny covid has made everyone. Or at the very least, how horny it has made me so that I interpret horniness in everything I hear. Nectar’s songs are passionate as a cowboy’s tryst, or a man who punches a jukebox to flex on a honey.

Self-aware and campy, Joji finds occasion to turn cultural trinkets into emotionally rich memorabilia as in ‘Tick Tock.’ Mixing acoustic guitars, his boyish vibrato, and Diplo, Joji finds his stride with the ballads he’s been approaching for years. Some words take flight, others fall flat. To me, “a beautiful afterthought” is a bad line, especially repeated more than once, but I know some of my more sweet-heart folks out there will hang on it, feeling their lives described perfectly where I find something story-bookish.

As my girlfriend put it to me recently, I am a bit of a surly bitch.

Still leaning on melodrama for melodic climax, Joji says things like we don’t have to love each other, “we just have to make it through the night,” as though an affair is somehow post-apocalyptic or equivalent in measure. Maybe it’s a sign we just don’t have enough physical strife in our lives that an unsavory emotional moment has cataclysmic triggers in the mind of many lovers.

Love the double-tracked vocals. He says “777” and I wonder if he knows about Alistair Crowley or not. “Little piece of heaven,” the man’s not afraid to go there. The same thing that earns Joji my derision also earns him my respect, both of which are enviable.

The textures are cool. The composition is tighter, which has the added benefit of not having come from an emotional wunder-kin, who typically experiences a decline in approachability the more produced he or she gets. Coming from his corner of the internet, the well-known youtuber has enjoyed and utilized the privilege of making a pet project into a meaningful body of work. Nectar is sexy, playful, loving, self-pitying, and brave by the same measure that it’s sentimental, which is mountainous. ⛰️

Listen to Nectar on Spotify. Joji · Album · 2020 · 18 songs.