Julia Jacklin’s Return: Pre Pleasure Album Review
| August 29, 2022 | Arts & Culture, Blog, Music,
After almost three years, Australian singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin has released her long awaited third album Pre Pleasure this past Friday.
The album carries the sincerity and introspection of past relationships from Jacklin’s previous album Crushing, creating a deeply personal and intimate essence. She also holds deeper, more mature topics that we didn’t hear in past albums. Pre Pleasure is centered around themes like struggles with religion, the effects of anxiety and shame on vulnerability, the pursuit of stability and balance in relationships, as well as Jacklin’s journey and views on love itself.
The album’s opener “Lydia Wears A Cross”, explains Jacklin’s relationship with religion. This track portrays Jacklin’s Catholic school days, painting the underage confusion and pressure around religion that she felt as a child. Jacklin also acknowledges that this struggle with faith is something that other people around her experienced too, singing: “Vivian’s holding on, / But singing every single word wrong”. Jacklin states that if religion was as simple as its rituals, then believing would not be so hard.
The following track, “Love, Try Not To Let Go” has a shift in sound from heavy deep drums to a lighter sound, as it explores the theme of love. Jacklin expresses a desire to both receive and provide love through her lyricism, singing: “Love, love is all that I want now/ Can I give my love to everyone somehow?” The track sound builds up and then drops back down, also reflecting this delicate yearn for love that is ultimately leading to aggravation. The happy go lucky melody and folkish groove takes breaks throughout this track to build a rockish tension, something Jacklin is notorious for.
The penultimate track, “Be Careful With Yourself” follows a similar pattern, incorporating grungy rock sounds with soft electric guitars. Jacklin explores feelings of anxiety in loving someone who has a hold on her own life and well-being. She sings, “Please stop smoking, want your life to last a long time. / If you dont stop smoking, I’ll have to start to shorten mine / I’m making plans for my future and I plan on you being in it.”
The fourth track, “I Was Neon”, a pop-rock song accompanied with melodic drums. In this track, Jacklin deals with the fear of losing certain parts of herself as life goes on, while simultaneously having the desire to rediscover and maintain them. The title, “I Was Neon” is a metaphor representing this fear of losing her most defining characteristics as she repeats: “Am I going to lose myself again?”.
As “I Was Neon” dies down it transitions into “Too In Love To Die”, the halfway point of the album. The song is dreamlike and mellow, incorporating church sounds like the soft echoes of an organ playing. Jacklin is fully immersed in the idea that nothing could take her away from love and that love itself could be the answer to her anxieties.
The smooth sound continues in the sixth track, “Less Of A Stranger”. This dulcet acoustic sounding song explores the complexities and intricacies of a mother-daughter relationship. During the second half of the song, we can hear layered voices in the chorus as if this is a mirrored feeling between both parties: “Sometimes I wonder, do I intimidate her?/ Do my questions and my pain, / Take like skin to a razor?” and ending with the repeated: “Oh, I just wish my own mother was / Less of a stranger”
The eighth track, “Magic” follows the fragile moment before an intimate meeting. Jacklins ability to be vulnerable is being overpowered by anxiety, shame, and ‘intrusive thoughts’. There are build ups throughout the song, making the listener expect something dramatic but then dying back down as she says: “Until I feel safe again”.
The tenth and final song on Pre Pleasure “End Of A Friendship” explores the topic of a toxic relationship. A slow build near the end of the song leads to the all-encompassing line, “All my love is spinning round the room,/ If only it would land on something soon”. The end of this track is tense through a mix of instruments that build and then slowly die down to an orchestra ending.
Throughout Pre Pleasure Jacklin taps into what she is good at: raw sincerity in her songwriting as well as her rock edge delivery. The ten tracks on the easy going album Pre Pleasure poetically share all the details and emotional weight that go into having peace and comfort or in this case pleasure.