Jamblu’s music enters my life quite strangely. I spend a couple of debilitating weeks listening to Service Animal, and it feels incapacitating – because all of it is so familiar that it almost hits like a kick in the ribs. So I abandon his discography, not that it is something so momentous that it would change something permanently, but I do not come back to any of his albums for months. However, my departure gets forfeited, almost — as one song enters my Spotify shuffle.
My Dreams Are Better On Life Support is a song title that sticks to your memory like gum caught in your hair. The song starts off with a banging, or an explosion — it almost feels like the sound of something cosmic, with the rippling synths, and a distorted, heavy voice marks its appearance. And it is back again, the disarming, the dismembering power that the artist has endowed his music with – “if i was too overbearing / it was only because i loved you / and if i ever let you down / it was because you loved me / there is no universe in which id want to leave you behind / but my mind and body / are nothing but temporary /i am unaware of my existence / i am still very much at home / and once this is over / i’d like to see you”, says the disembodied voice, as the banging loops over and over. The beginning is almost like a Japanese commercial break’s sound, and you could read the banging as a gong — or maybe it is the sound of a door forced open. It is interesting – while most of Jamblu’s music is different electronic, experimental soundscapes, he is one good writer – because it almost feels like he is ripping his heart out of his chest, prying it open with his own hands, tracing every thing he has ever felt, putting it back in, and sewing it all up. Then repeat. Rewind. All that jazz.
Extended Priorities has the beats at the pace of a heart – with light thrashing for impact, and a similar pattern follows through on “Slow Slow Dance Goodbye”. Made along with Andor Wenden, it has a conversation and a saxophone, and a looping “they’re all friends of mine” on the entire track. It almost feels like sitting in someone’s living room, and you see the seeds of the jazz derivations already, the kind that is going to inhabit Service Animal in its totality. There is a “fucking hell, nobody dies, everything’s fine,” and a “we love each other”, and one wonders and wanders through all of it. It almost feels like a consolation submerged in disbelief.
Gone Swimming, the titular track, is almost irreconcilable to me. It is also the most fun one. With hyperpop-esque soundbytes having the texture of a television of a glitch, it intersperses some textures you can hear assemble into resolute pieces. A collaboration with Shantam and Morning Mourning, it has poetry, and distant vocals sung loosely over twangy guitars and MIDI keyboards. It is playful, which is refreshing, considering the entire record locates itself in anguish, partially, if not completely. It is so well disjointed that it makes sense.
There is so much bite to Jamblu’s music, it almost feels like he has injured himself completely. The artist is a soundsmith, because you can place the layers, they are all mounted atop each other and they all flow and bleed into each other. In an interview with Bhanuj Kappal for Service Animal, the artist, the producer, Jamblu, Kartik Pillai tells “I was having these miniature breakdowns every couple of weeks,” he told me when I caught up with him over the phone last week. “And there are these songs that come out when I am at a low point. Usually, at those points I come up with these hyper-honest songs where I am not pulling any punches, not even being metaphorical at times.” Hyper-honest is a good phrase to describe his music – even though he is not pulling punches with lyricism, even when he is not saying anything at all. Gone Swimming, the EP is not very performative – at least it does not sound like it was made for an audience to find themselves in, instead it is personal and works like a functional map to a thought process and emotions that he leaves inaccessible throughout the course of the album. That is the mystery, that is the revelation, of it all.
