It has been a cracking decade for Julia Jacklin – well, at least with music critics and other musicians. Having received rave reviews for her first three albums (2016’s Don’t Let the Kids Win, 2019’s Crushing, and 2022’s Pre Pleasure) and delivered one side project to spice things up (2018’s Phantastic Ferniture), she has received much adulation from contemporaries like Faye Webster, but the level of success with general audiences has perhaps not quite lived up to what she fully deserves.
Of course, that wouldn’t be such an unusual occurrence in music. Since at least the 50s there have been unheralded geniuses, but in most cases that happened with artists that were audibly (and sometimes even visibly) going against the grain. With Jacklin that is not the case. She’s got the full musical sense, works within that span that covers modern indie rock over to singer-songwriter pop, and has a brilliant voice.
So what is it critics and other artists like and the broader audience hasn’t just caught up with yet? Like some other Australian greats – The Go-Betweens and The Triffids coming up to mind first – there is sort of a twist in her music that defies the usual songwriting formulas associated with rock and pop. It might be that all the usual elements are there, but not arranged in an expected manner. Sometimes Jacklin’s music sounds like it might fall apart any second, but it never does, and instead she creates something simply beautiful. The cracked-heart strummer “Angel Vision”, from her new album The Gem, is a great example of that.
So here we are with her fourth album, The Gem, which takes its title from the name of Jacklin’s favourite pub in Melbourne. And, it turns out, there’s a recording studio above it where this album was actually captured. “It felt like I was in the world as I was making this record, instead of isolated from it,” Jacklin has said. “I enjoyed having to work around the sounds of a neighborhood and the sounds of the pub.”
It seems that instead of overthinking it by simply referencing what she has done on her previous three albums, Jacklin went for an intuitive approach, to pour things out as they came and let them flow. You get that feeling right from the start with album opener “Brand New”. Her approach of placing musical elements together that might not seem like natural combinations, but work together almost in perfection, can be heard in the harp and incessant drum on “Real Life”, and the incredible guitar sound on “Walk On Me” – complete with wicked solo. Elsewhere, lead singl “Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon)” is a straight ahead pop rocker that is prime Jacklin and a sort of encapsulation of all her greatness.
A lazy listener might think that Jacklin is repeating herself here, but that’s completely wrong. Yes, there’s no doubt it’s Julia Jacklin, but she never repeats herself – the emotions and arrangements ure unmistakably hers, but they’re as urgent as if they’re still fresh scars, no matter how many times you listen. A true gem, indeed.
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