The Brighton-based trio Assistant reformed in 2020 after an eighteen-year gap. Their new album Certain Memories is their third since lockdown and follows the albums In The April Sun and This World Could Be So Much. The titles alone hint at the band’s wistful and gorgeous sound.
On opening track ‘My Phone Began to Ring’, Jonathan Shipley recalls receiving some news while “standing near a pond / near the house of Raymond Briggs”. It’s such a specific yet entirely relatable lyric, which is a standard for Assistant – they express the personal while capturing the universal like all the best poets do. While the aforementioned news is about a physical ailment, the lines ‘Well I could walk for miles and miles / but be breathless where I stood’ convey the ennui that can grip each one of us at any moment. The track ends in a shimmering cacophony of guitars, like being bathed by a thunderstorm.
‘Song for Jil’, with its reverbed vocals, gentle chords and flourishes of melodica, is a woozy walk down memory lane. In the song’s video, we see Jonathan and his young family enjoying the simple pleasures of a sun-drenched walled garden. Occasionally, he sings straight to the camera as if he’s addressing his elderly mum, Jil, who had a fall a couple of years ago. It’s clearly a deeply personal song, yet, once more, lines such as “Mum, you’ve been gone a long time / Come home” are destined to resonate.
‘Jil is Fading’ begins with simple campfire strumming and the memory of marrying ‘in the heat of the summer’. In what was ‘supposed to be our year’, the reality of Jil’s deterioration eclipses the intended happiness. ‘And the pain is appalling! / No amount of warnings / can prepare / ah yeah,’ Jonathan sings on the chorus, buoyed by the harmonies of the wonderfully-named Helen McCookerybook. If you want a melody so catchy that you’ll hum it in your dreams, then listen no further.
‘Derek Jarman’ preserves the memory of a trip to the late artist’s home, Prospect Cottage, which is on the coast of Dungeness and in the shadow of decommissioned nuclear reactors. ‘That house is a headstone’ is both an apt metaphor and a subtle telling off for visitors nicking trinkets. ‘Before And After You’ is a mesmerising detour into French electronica, and its final lines (translated) “All the things that happened to us / I remember them / They seem eternal to me” form a perfectly concise summary of the album’s core theme. On ‘Bring Them In’ the band implore an unknown someone/something to ‘bring them in, bring them in’ and ‘slow the seas, slow the seas’ while ghostly guitar sweeps in like the beams of a lighthouse. ‘Fresh Ingredients’ has the deceptively shambling tone of a C86 classic and wouldn’t sound out of place on a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album. ‘Tread’, which is also sung by Anne-Sophie Marsh, is, in the band’s own words, ‘escalating shoegaze’ inspired by the 1995 discovery of an intruder living in a loft in Washington state.
Certain memories are so precious that you want them to remain secret, yet also so beautiful that you want to share them with the whole world. Such is the bind you’ll be in when you listen to Certain Memories by Assistant. Tell your friends and tell your family, especially your mum.
Assistant: Jonathan Shipley (guitars, vocals), Peter Simmons (guitars, vocals), Anne Sophie Marsh (keyboards, vocals)
Assistant socials: Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram | X | YouTube
Certain Memories is released through Subjangle: Facebook | Bandcamp | X
Review by Neil Laurenson
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