James - Yummy
Let joy be the only contagiousness that is permissible, approachable, sharable and embraceable. Music is in danger of losing its ancient peculiarity, which was to bring minds and bodies closer together.
James, with their eighteenth studio album, provide, as is often the case with them, the example, the stimulus, the possibility of maintaining qualities and finding new ones. Their approach is still that of a group of people intent on renewing their passport and their identity, proposing new stylistic forms, generating amazement at their profound intention not to sit back on the past: too intelligent, too far ahead to profit from the love of their many admirers. Yummy is a docile roar, programmed to creep in without making too much noise, but with the unquestionable quality of pushing you to commit to listening. It will take a lot for many to be able to accept, firstly, this willingness to write hermetic songs, little accessible to easy chewing except in brief moments, especially in the choruses, and, secondly, to be able to clearly ingest this intention of a writing body that seems to be 'limited' to four of the Manchester band's members.
Many, both musicians and listeners, remain anchored to what brought them together, favouring a decidedly immature and nostalgic side that fails to appreciate and consider the need for an identity to grow. A continuous noose around the neck that turns off any new and innovative flow.
There are times when a sound ensemble can be a funnel: this makes us all fall into the space of beauty together and there is nothing more sensually appetising than a rainbow floating in time. James take it and show us its intensity until we can smell its fragrance. They have never been tied to their home territory, never direct and devoted sons of their city, but rather musicians capable of flying over the world and absorbing its smells, tensions, dreams, enriching their attitudinal vocabulary, navigating changes, showing them, and enriching our lives with pulsations, reflections, dances in a continuous way. The latest work demonstrates all this, starting from the sounds, from an incredible general groove that seduces and shakes, to continue with Tim's lyrics, once again skilful in renewing language, directions, dimensions to confirm the very high level of writing.
The live experience with a gospel orchestra and choir allowed them to renew their repertoire, but it was certainly also an opportunity to suggest new possibilities with these twelve hypnotic sirens. Life, death, success, anxiety, exaggeration, pain, irony are just some of the singer's trajectories. But the music knows how to do the same: not only the perfect bride of the lyrics, but an eager parent giving discipline to ever-awake, capable talents, able to bring it all to a high state. Multiple sensations and emotions find themselves injected with positivity, like an act that cannot cease to exist even though the world seems to opt for suicide. Here we find joie de vivre through the freshness of Leo Abrahams' production, the sensual movements of continuous blends of the most elegantly focused pop, the use of electronics that is at the root of different musical genres, like a sensory circle that rejects a single dimension. Furthermore, listening becomes vision, a film that changes script, skilfully continuing to physically vary the characters' features. In doing so, everything becomes a gathering, attendance, assistance, friendship, a committee of ideas that progress without ever tiring.
In the fifth decade of their incredible artistic journey, James of recent years seem more swaggering, less interested in the politics of consensus and, like justifiably stubborn mules, they walk through their choices with pride and satisfaction, to be able to show that music, at least the music of writing, belongs to them. Afterwards, it's a different story.
One is often moved, the question marks seem like missiles in party dress, harmless in that they do not kill, but certainly not intended to pass unnoticed. In fact, one's stomach often finds itself calling for oxygen, one realises that the quality that has always been part of their DNA (that of communicating things one knows in a different way and saying other things completely unknown) is still very much present. It changes the dress, not their being students, first of all, of themselves. It hurts, let me tell you, to think that a band should be the executor of the dreams of those who love them. These nine souls turn their backs, walk through the songs like breaths in the night rainbow, like invisible spirits, but in the end, when the day wakes up, you realise they were right, depositing songs in the sky that slowly stick to your heart, lubricating those veins that are less and less capable of passing new molecules through themselves.
Yes, Yummy is a surprising record, modern, prone to grouping sounds and vocabulary on a day when boredom and melancholy seek a foothold, a helping hand. Here it is, present, constant, inclined to be an eternal embrace that, if it apparently seems difficult to assimilate, has actually made a pact with time. They are patient these young old men, perceptive, knights of taste with big hands, so that they can take our uncertainties and place them in the zone where everything rests.
Salvific, regenerating, literary, these twelve songs are the overtaking of ignorance, unsuspected stamps of a new way of belonging to the colours of prodigious work, spiteful because they deny everyone access to the ease of deception. One must study, shift the centre of gravity of vices and bury them, for eternity...
More and more the sensitivity of their art emerges, no longer a megaphone that attracts attention, but a set of pages to be read in silence: this is the real magic of this latest album by James...
Song by Song
1 - Is This Love
An emotional blanket, capable of going beyond the questions, permeates the sonic fabrics and like a surgical procedure worthy of Houdini, brings the band back for a moment into the stylistic territories of the early 2000s. One dreams, one writhes gently around a track that links a minimalist strategy of instruments to an epidermal flight provided by Tim's singing.
2 - Life's A Fucking Miracle
The world, with its chaotic social assemblages, manages to find stability with the knowledge that life is, in a secular way, an unquestionable miracle. Slow, straightforward, it arrives at the centre with a refrain that establishes the desired contact with reality that must be updated, changed and assembled. Showy and rigorous, it fully delivers to the world the flexibility of their conception of artistic creation.
3 - Better With You
Tim Booth and Chloe Alper become the actors in a love drawing that reveals how sweetness has always been the James' prerogative, here with the skill of a progression that, starting from slowness, manages to develop angelic plots. Freed from heavy chains, the singer flies lightly in the current of the winds. How to bring the 1950s to the present day...
4 - Stay
An extraordinary example of how tension is capable of conveying a lack of footholds, eluding all definition, to be a chameleon in search of challenges, this piece demonstrates the alchemic structure of improvisation, of conscious flows that do not require to be placed within rules. A guitar arpeggio that smells of heaven, drums that hold us in its grip with its simplicity to make a pop song the caress we need.
5 - Shadow Of A Giant
Jon Hopkins lends his fingers and talent to the track's introduction, in what is the album's dreamiest and longest episode. It climbs up to meet the stars, with the strings becoming the thermometer of our emotion, for an incredible ability to extend the notes in a progression that envelops the senses. We travel between sadness and anticipation, with Chloe's voice wetting our faces in the distance until Saul's gypsy violin makes us cry...
6 - Way Over Your Head
Tim Booth once again turns his gaze towards conditions where precariousness, weakness and poverty have no way to smile. He takes care of it, however, with this lyric and the music seems to be waiting for the final chorus, capable of making the palpitations vibrate. It is an invitation to look for someone to put the suffering to sleep and it is in this part of the song that many James lovers might be satisfied: sometimes the armistice happens between those who want to go forward and those who stay behind. When the band builds a sonic palace like this one realises that the love for them will not end, because everything here feels like a harvest of fruit along the notes that slowly swell the chest...
7 - Mobile God
A weapon, constant and dangerous, reveals its existence: the music is a continuous vibration, a probing of expressive possibilities, to leave to the lyrics the analysis of a reality subjugated by the technological use of communication, in which the actual slavery shows new chains. The groove is a mixture of electronics and guitars that surround the lyrics with a dry chord until reaching the refrain that frees the cadenced circuits from the chorus that vibrates in the circuits of satellites full of information that clog our lives. Clamorous!
8 - Our World
The world plummets with its own physical upheaval, unrecognisable from a short time ago, saturated with alienating selfishness and experimentation. The opening whistle is a marvellous deception of the subject matter and, as with the Smiths' best moments, the contrast between words and music makes for a constantly alert fuse. Melodic, pop, it actually thrives on chaos made gentle...
9 - Rogue
Life should be a conscious state, not a mass of events. Starting from this consideration, both words and music make intuition, duty and a new consciousness accessible. In a successful attempt to maintain existence in a state where decisions are consciously structured to improve conditions. The semi-acoustic guitars return to bark and it's pure joy, Jim's driven vocals and bass that catapults us, with softness and vivacity, into an effervescent dance.
10 - Hey
Joy, cheerfulness and dynamism make this episode the one most intent on making smiles and laughter physical, in a pure act of uncompromising positivity. It begins, however, as a sorrowful, chaotic flush, only to lose its electronic afflatus and become a modern lullaby that, instead of making us sleep, makes us realise how music is a bridge between truth and the need to change our convictions. The title is repeated several times and then dilates into deadly instrument crossovers.
11 - Butterfly
The moment that will make those who have always loved James exult. All their past characteristics are deposited here in a perfect song, a kiss to their history, a thank you and a bow, in which the embrace of time gives enthusiasm and great joy: if there is a place where everyone will be happy, it is in the angelic dimension of this episode. The beginning is a psychedelic thread that then becomes, in Jim's singing (for a few moments) an embrace of 'Really Hard', from their debut album Stutter, and the most delicate moments of their history that we are fond of. We are moved with immense, liberating joy....
12 - Folks
It sounds like a farewell, a bitter smile, which with cello and trumpet seems to make us understand time as a very long matter indeed. The singing becomes evocative as never before: it shows the wrinkles of energy and worry, its voice like sand from an hourglass about to settle in the arms of infinity, the silent, voiceless one. Touching, dramatic, the farewell reserves emotions and coughs: his worries are ours too. The piano notes, distorted in the distance, seem to come from the theatre of fear, then everything melts away, harmony and melody tracing the road on which Tim's words become dew to make this last episode an anomalous waltz in the context of a pop song that kisses infinity...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
12 Aprile 2024
