If you’ve never heard of Jerkcurb, you might think it’s a skate punk band. A bunch of scrappy young lads who love guitar riffs just as much as catchy hooks. You’d be mistaken.
Jerkcurb is South London singer-songwriter, animator and painter Jacob Read, and his music sounds nothing like skate punk. Since May 2010 when, aged 18, he shared the song ‘Shadowshow’ – a reworked version of which would open his debut album, Air Con Eden, nine years later – Read’s output has been dreamlike and melancholy, best played at night while, eyes closed, you imagine you’re in a film co-directed by David Lynch, Wong Kar-wai and Jim Jarmusch.
A cinephile, Read wanted to follow up Air Con Eden with an album similar to the grandiose soundtracks from Hollywood’s golden age. He immersed himself in the work of mid-20th century composers and envisioned a record bathed in shadows, heavier in tone and performed by a full band. Then tragedy struck: his father, a fellow painter and music aficionado, as well as Read’s creative inspiration and reference point, passed away.
Ideas of big-band splendour no longer made sense and, while grieving back in his familial home, Read transformed the songs he’d written, combining them with the material that poured forth during an unexpected creative flourishing. Drawing from The Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout, Talk Talk, Kate Bush, Philip Glass and 80s Japanese environmental ambient music, the songs on Night Fishing on a Calm Lake create a beautiful, if disquieting world.
Though Read’s original plan collided with losing his father, his sophomore LP still reaches for grandeur, it’s just that it does so through texture and feeling rather than sheer size. Some of the songs sound like the score for some late-40s film noir – ‘Loss Dub’ with its smooth trumpet is a case in point – but they often start with a small motif and build from there, adding instruments, changing rhythms or gathering pace.
Take ‘Hungry’, a disarmingly direct, almost understated song about renewal. “I’ve been hungry for life again / How much time does grieving take?” Read sings surrounded by unassuming synths as the rhythm section gently marks time. In stark contrast to his profound emotions, the song seems modest, resisting big choruses, but it lets the small changes in tone give that line weight. Anything that appears simple is only deceptively so.
‘Too Much Intelligence’ harks back to Read’s early low-fi material, but the influence of Philip Glass’s minimalism has patterns repeating and shifting until he ends up with an unsettling trance. He could have polished everything into tight pop structures, but he allows the track – every track, in fact – to wander instead. Synth lines loop, the percussion nudges forward and back, backing vocals provided by Gray Rimmer and Lara Laeverenz from the concept choir WOOM come in when you don’t expect them and then vanish again – or stick around as they do in the hauntingly enchanting ‘Help You’. One moment Emma Barnaby’s cello wraps you in a haze of indulgence, the next a jagged synth snaps you out of it. This tonal confusion is the most honest, or maybe the only, way for Read to map and process his grief.
Though born in the dead of night during early lockdown writing sessions, the songs aren’t dark. Or rather, they keep the hope alive that, while nothing will ever be the same again, life is going to get better. In the Americana-heavy ‘Home on the Ranch’, a reformed cowboy promises he’ll build a home for his family. “I will go but I won’t be long / Home on the ranch / Alone / You build me up to this my love / And I’ll build it for you”. Given the familiar archetype of a cowboy promising a fresh start, the song feels comforting and warm but, once again, nothing is as straightforward as it seems. The closer you listen, the more crooked that promise sounds, and sure enough, there’s a hollow echo the fiddle cannot quite fill.
Night Fishing on a Lake is full of such contradictions and doubt. “You want to give up / But you wait / For anything at all / But your head is underwater”, Read sings on ‘Larchmont’ in the passionate falsetto of Grant Lee Phillips. Will that ‘you’ pull through? The song leaves you in suspense. You know, like one of those grand, lush Old Hollywood classics that inspired him to start writing the album in the first place. He ended up creating something authentic and more intriguing instead: a gorgeous magical‑realist soundtrack to a life that has lost one of its main characters.
Night Fishing on a Calm Lake is out 28 November on Handsome Dad Records.
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Review by Attila Peter
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