Jay Som - Everybody Works

Pitchfork 86

Virtuous though it may be, patience is a difficult quality to capture in guitar rock, a medium that much prefers boldness, concision, and urgency. Perhaps that’s why Bay Area multi-instrumentalist Melina Duterte’s reverence for the human capacity to wait and think and grow comes across as a revelation on Everybody Works, her first official album as Jay Som. “Take time to figure it out,” she advises on lead single “The Bus Song.” In its context, she’s caught between relationship statuses, assuring the object of her fixation that she’ll “be the one who sticks around.” As an introduction to an album full of reminders not to rush things, though, the line is a relief, enough to make you involuntarily exhale.

Bedroom pop is a genre designation that loses meaning by the year—not just as technology creeps closer to erasing any distinction between studio production and home recording, but also as the musicians associated with it develop tastes more varied and less retro than, say, Ariel Pink’s. Twenty-two-year-old Duterte made the fuzzy, dreamy, plaintive aesthetic her own on Turn Into, nine self-recorded tracks she uploaded to Bandcamp on a tipsy whim over a year ago and re-released with Polyvinyl in late 2016, billing the makeshift debut as a collection of “finished and unfinished songs” rather than a proper album. Although she made Everybody Works alone in her bedroom studio, its repertoire ranges from folk to funk to chart pop. It’s not a bedroom-pop album because it sounds a certain way, but because it feels so intimate. Most of Duterte’s elaborate songs could be mistaken for full-band compositions, yet her preference for writing and recording in solitude imbues each one with an introspective quality.

Liberated from the obligation to conform to any one sound, Duterte investigates new styles with purpose. She’s smitten with Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION, and it shows in the hooky choruses of “The Bus Song” and “Remain,” two tracks steeped in exuberant longing. With its smooth keyboards and slinky bass line, “Baybee” comes on like an R&B slow jam, but instead of steaming up the windows, it’s about seducing yourself into seeing your beloved through a rough patch: “If I leave you alone/When you don’t feel right/I know we’ll sink for sure,” Duterte coos on top of the music, like a layer of pure calm. “1 Billion Dogs” submerges anxious lyrics in a cloud of feedback that melds shoegaze, indie pop, and grunge as if it were a forgotten gem from the DGC Rarities compilation.

But the most arresting songs are the ones that defy categorization entirely. The first minute of the album, on “Lipstick Stains,” sounds the way orchestra instruments might upon waking from an afternoon nap, blinking and stretching in the sunlight. When the vocals kick in more than halfway through the track, Duterte’s murmur is just as drowsily blissful: “I like the way your lipstick stains/The corner of my smile,” she breathes. Everybody Works closes with “For Light,” an epic, seven-minute ballad that transforms a whispered promise—“I’ll be right on time/Open blinds for light/Won’t forget to climb”—into a sing-along prayer by adding in the voices of backup singers. The mood of weary resilience is reminiscent of Nick Cave’s “Push the Sky Away,” another album-closing message of encouragement that fully acknowledges the herculean effort it takes, sometimes, to merely keep going.

As that comparison suggests, Duterte has absorbed more of life’s hard lessons than most of us do by age 22. The patience that suffuses Everybody Works doesn’t reflect the naïveté of a kid who’s sure she has unlimited time to chase her ambitions and find love; it comes out of an emotionally mature view of relationships and the 10 years of work she has already put into her songwriting, taking shitty jobs and enduring family strife to become the musician she is today. “I’ll remain under your moon,” she pledges on “Remain,” an anthem of (perhaps one-sided) commitment. “Everybody Works” registers Duterte’s resentment at how easily success seems to come to the “rock star” who make her wonder, “Did you pay your way through?” But empathy wins out in the end; she makes “everybody works” a mantra, repeating the phrase as though to remind herself of the way other people’s painstaking efforts can be invisible to us.

“All of my songs are so different, but you know it’s me,” Duterte remarked in a recent Pitchfork profile. She’s right, and there’s no better indicator that a songwriter has found her voice than the ability to explore new styles and still sound like the same artist. Just a few years into her adult life, and only one album into her recording career, Melina Duterte has swept past a milestone many musicians never even get in their sights.

Fri Mar 10 06:00:00 GMT 2017

Tiny Mix Tapes 70

Jay Som
Everybody Works

[Polyvinyl; 2017]

Rating: 3.5/5

Crystal ball emoji, trumpet emoji, the emoji heart with the vibes radiating from its top. Insight, play, and vulnerability make up the communication style of Jay Som, the project of Bay Area-based multi-instrumentalist Melina Duterte. Seeing Duterte live last summer made me want to get out my guitar and text myself with it, drafting a love letter with just a few spare chords. The direct, emotive appeal of her live shows (and of last year’s Turn Into) is built out into full-band arrangements on her latest full-length, Everybody Works. The album is, in her own words, about “finding some peace within yourself” as an adult. “Last time I was angry at the world,” she said of her earlier work. “This is a note to myself: everybody’s trying their best on their own set of problems and goals. We’re all working for something.”

Safe in a sexy way, Everybody Works is about pleasure that comes at no one’s expense. Inventive chamber-rock arrangements are laden with hooks and drops of meaning. On “1 Billion Dogs,” one of many highlights, drums set up Duterte’s vocals and then let her loose; each pause in the form predicates a next-level utterance. On “Everybody Works,” soft verses and loud choruses alternate just appropriately enough to please, as little phrases cascade within bigger ones. On “Baybee,” the big-beat chorus encourages us to dance, but it doesn’t require it: “I’ll play a game or song/ If you don’t feel right.” That last line repeats as a refrain until we really hear its condition: “If you don’t feel right.” Pop music manipulates; this record only makes you feel good if you want it to.

Much has been made of the fact that Duterte made the album in her bedroom, which is mostly a moot point, given that bedrooms are where most good music is made today. In any case, the music sounds great, featuring synth riffs, horn lines, and double-tracked duets of guitar and voice, fricative timbral taffy that catches, tugs, and sticks. Compression comes when the mood calls for it, even as mud is made of lines like “Nerves caught around my neck/ I called out for help/ My words turned into ash/ They went nowhere/ As if I’m barely there,” on “(Bedhead),” a detuned, gauzy fragment of a recording that recollects the best avant-indie: Modest Mouse when noise reigned, Broken Social Scene at peak redux. Ultra-present vocals and sparkly guitars are placed upon a hazy bed of mids, a hybrid approach. At 2:07, an elegant glitch reboots the phrase, and it literally begins again, replenished. This production supports the narrator’s account of getting back on her feet.

In a hyper-mediated, post-fact, worn-out world, reliable narrators are few and far between. I wonder about myself sometimes: when I was 22, as Duterte is, or even 23, I was anxiously over-eager, easily made irate. If age is nothing but a number, why do I find myself marveling at the way she assures us on the standout single “The Bus Song,” with measured wisdom, “Take time to figure it out/ I’ll be the one who sticks around”? Hints of piano, bursts of bass, melodies of light she made herself, for days. If you’re in need of someone you can count on, Jay Som is here to stay.

Wed Mar 22 04:00:00 GMT 2017