Adult Jazz - Earrings Off!

Drowned In Sound 80

Bands this studious don’t just drop out of the sky. As Adult Jazz’s labyrinthine tumblr page would suggest, the key to the brilliance of Gist Is was years of hard graft and artistic evolution, almost entirely on their own terms. For a self-released, self-recorded and self-produced record, it’s about as unique as you’d expect, and deserving of much more analysis than the shallow mantra that 'sometimes it sounds a bit like Dirty Projectors'.

The toil involved in making Gist Is makes it even more surprising that they’ve followed it up so quickly – Earrings Off! appears less than two years later, falling into the suitably obscure ‘mini-album’ format. Once again, it’s erudite stuff – lyrically, frontman Harry Burgess targets humanity’s preoccupation with identity, particularly its suppression of femininity: “We make the boy a banner … but he can’t look up and ever read the letters … are you happy with that?” he asks accusingly on the record’s title track. Talking of titles, the choice of Earrings Off! is worth reading into – it’s a song and a lyric, but it’s more clearly an exclamation of dominance, a statement of prejudice against freedom of identity. With physical, violent imagery (“my brother punched and kicked his earrings off!”) Burgess rails on this pious monitoring of body image, requesting on the closing moments of ‘Eggshell’ for us to “talk / creature-to-creature”.

This record thus sees Adult Jazz readily donning their thinking caps and scrutiny goggles again. Where Gist Is saw Burgess bravely address the clash between his Christian upbringing and his homosexuality, on Earrings Off! he studies society’s blemishes just as academically, and like it’s bizarre humanoid artwork, from unnervingly close range.

Sonically too, Earrings Off! creates an environment of division and unease – there are three short interludes in its run time that are almost completely abstract, with sputtering strings, fragmented bursts of percussion and, on ‘Cry for Coherence’, eerie synthetic sobs (like, actual crying). Even when things are a little more straightforward, the band do their best to overthrow it – as soon as a semblance of rhythm appears on ‘Ooh Ah Eh’ it’s toppled like a sonic Jenga tower. These jarring experiments are no doubt carefully planned – like directors of an art-house film or theatre production, the band surround Burgess’ lyrical themes of brokenness and imperfection with an equally fractured score.

That’s the beauty of Earrings Off! and Adult Jazz in general – like good, thought provoking art, there’s a lot worth exploring. Despite there being only about 25 minutes of music here I’ve practically written a thesis, and that can only be to Adult Jazz’s credit. Scholarly musings aside though, Earrings Off! is undoubtedly a brave, intriguing release, and should cement Adult Jazz as a band you really can’t afford to ignore.

The Guardian 60

(Tri Angle)

Earrings Off! might not be the easiest of listens, but then it’s unlikely anyone looking for an easy listen will be plumping for an artist called Adult Jazz in the first place, let alone one whose music attempts to examine ideas surrounding body image, gender archetypes and liberation from masculinity. At its best, this mini-album aligns the London-via-Leeds quartet’s wildly experimental tendencies with a twisted pop nous that recalls Dirty Projectors, Björk or Strange Mercy-era St Vincent. The title track alone features squealing synthesisers, abrupt rhythmic changes and a melody line that gets unexpectedly pitch-shifted downwards. It’s awkward yet exhilarating, like the best adventurous pop music should be. Earrings Off! is as much art project as it is pop album, though, and three of these seven tracks are brief instrumentals that don’t attempt to soften their avant ambitions. (Cry for Home) could be an exploration of the theories of Julia Kristeva for all we can tell, but it still sounds like a five-year-old’s first euphonium lesson being played backwards, which might be a bit much for some.

Pitchfork 60

The British experimental rock group Adult Jazz has no problem cramming their music with ideas and lofty goals. In interviews describing their 2014 debut Gist Is, they name dropped Hermann Hesse, criticized religious institutions, and said that the album tackled everything from morality to empathy and the efficacy of communication itself. NPR even followed suit when reviewing the record, saying it was concerned with “the search for meaning in life.” Two years later they’ve released their sophomore follow-up, Earrings Off! a record that equally embraces the same theory-laden attitude. Earrings Off! is meant to analyze the complexities of gender and the body’s changing place in society. In descriptions of the album, the band has stressed the record’s interest in “the possibility of authenticity” in a society that rewards normative behavior.

It’s all very interesting to read about what an album is supposed to do, and there is precedent for the political thrust of a piece of music to affect the conversation it’s entering, but these intentions can so often backfire. (PJ Harvey’s The Hope Six Demolition Project being a case study for this fine line). The cleverness and unique playfulness of Adult Jazz's debut Gist Is helped steer it away from the cliff of self-indulgence and pretension. Earrings Off! edges much closer to that drop-off than its predecessor, burdened by often-silly lyrics and a sound that is a bit more derivative than their last record would suggest.

What still remains uniquely rewarding about Adult Jazz’s music is the construction of their sound. They use a trombone, cello, processed vocals, and a menagerie of sample to tread the line between acidic minimalism and bubbly exuberance in confoundingly expert ways. Of this album’s seven songs, three of them (“(Cry for Time Off,)” “(Cry for Coherence),” and “(Cry for Home)”) are short sonic sketches, serving as the most interesting moments in the otherwise slow pace of Earrings Off!’s 24 minutes. These three songs mostly focus on single sounds—a helium-cracked vocal cry, dissonant string loops, and the bated breath of a brass instrument. These pared-down constructions generate more and more detail on repeated listens. The album’s four other songs attempt to mimic this but come off as overwrought and heavy handed at best.

The difficult six minutes of “Pumped From Above” exploits corrosive horn sounds and maddeningly uneven drumming for all their worth. It could almost sound like a facsimile of a Peter Brötzman composition, but the arrangement of the chaotic noises can be curiously predictable. The singing is usually so swaddled by the noises that Harry Burgess’ words are obscured, but when you look at what he’s saying on paper it can make the experience even more cringe-inducing. Take this passage: “God cannot be softening/He beats strong with iron wings/Kneeling sporty chest pumping/Before the Alpha-lord.” You can open up any book of poems by Hart Crane or Dylan Thomas and find a similar impenetrability. But these words and images have the feeling of being selected at random; their difficulty doesn't have a sense of clarity or deeper meaning and incomprehensibility isn't the same as seriousness.

This is a running thread through the album that detracts from where Earrings Off! improves upon their debut. They’ve learned how to create hooks without sacrificing from their outre sounds. This is best accomplished in the title track (which pleasantly confirms any of the Dirty Projectors comparisons) and “Eggshell.” But even the pleasure of craft can melt away when you figure out amidst the textures these words are ringing out: “And if he's 1940's/He whistles through a meadow.” It makes it impossible for the album to actually engage with the conversation it proposes, and often made me wish I could ignore the words and allow the singing to be another instrument. Earrings Off! is filled with these sorts of growing pains, ones that hopefully point to brighter pastures sometime soon for this promising band.