Album of the week: JJerome87 – 'The Canyon'
Joe Newman, the frontman of alt-J, steps out alone as JJerome87 on his remarkable solo album
JJerome87 is the nomme de groove of Joe Newman, frontman with alt-J. Having got together while they were students at Leeds University, the brainiac band (then a quartet, now a trio) won the 2012 Mercury Music Prize for their debut album An Awesome Wave. Over succeeding albums – This Is All Yours (2014), Relaxer (2017), The Dream (2022) – this big-thinking outfit both refined and loosened their music. Art-electro, math-folk, hymnal-rock, alt-pop, call it what you will – none of it’s wholly wrong, all of it’s someway right.
On 2014’s ‘Hunger of the Pine’ they sampled their own remix for Miley Cyrus. On Relaxer, they covered ‘House of the Rising Sun’, but in a wholly alt-J way, stripping the varnish from The Animals’ take and finding the woody grain in Woody Guthrie’s version of the lyrics. Then, the following year, they released Reduxer: every track on the album redone, with inspired wing-people ranging from Little Simz to Pusha T to Rejjie Snow.
Now, two decades since their formation, Newman is going (hopefully temporarily) solo. And, wonky artist name notwithstanding, The Canyon is a top-to-bottom masterpiece of songcraft, production and accompanying visuals. Lead single ‘Brush Me Like a Horse’ is a magisterial, country-choral, spaghetti-western epic, with a chorus as breathtaking as Monument Valley. The accompanying video is appropriately widescreen, cinematic and surreal, the bastard offspring of John Ford and David Lynch.
The sprinting indie-guitar pop of second single ‘Track and Field’ is a celebration of athletics, specifically female competitors, with the inspiring video a feast of decades-spinning archive footage of warm-ups, races and sporting contests. Melody-wise, it could be a PB for Newman, which is saying something.
The Canyon opens with ‘Mr. Alligator’, a sun-baked blues that showcases both his remarkable singing range and this album’s masterful deployment of multiple (female) vocals. In the lyrical picture painted, it’s up there with the ripe Southern Gothic swirl of Nick Cave’s wondrous debut novel And the Ass Saw the Angel: “I'm a creature / Nice to meet yuh / I cooked quiche yeah / For the congregation / But I'm not to be trusted”.
‘Green Velvet’ is a feat of psych-pop engineering, interlayering glockenspiel, swinging organ, twanging guitar and another star-scraping chorus. In a nod to the city where the record was recorded, ‘Quaaludes’ evokes a soulful, wee hours drive across Los Angeles, albeit not while under the influence of the titular disco biscuits.
Aware that all that, only three tracks in, could be A Bit Much (but gloriously so), Newman serves up a pretty, 37-second piano palate-cleanser titled, yes, ‘Interlude’. Then it’s on with the show. The sleazy, shoulder-rolling ‘Juicy’ feels like either a frazzled day on a Californian beach or a fried night at an East London afters. Opening with the snorts and pounding of horses, ‘Walkaway Music’ is galloping surf-rock.
Then, coming immediately after the mighty ‘Brush Me Like a Horse’ on this boldly, brilliantly sequenced album, is ‘Two Hearts’. It is, in a wholly lovely way, cardiac arresting. A sweeping, strings-lifted ballad, it begins with the sound of Newman’s pregnant partner receiving an ultrasound scan and the sonographer saying, with an audible smile: “The lovely heart beating in the chest there… We’re dancing…” That baby, born in 2021, appears on the cover art (painted by Sally Dunne, also responsible for the artist-at-work visualiser for ‘Mr. Alligator’), standing at her daddy’s shoulder. It’s an image as moving as this wonderful ode to motherhood and parenthood.
It ends with ‘Pennine’, a swirling, jazzy, kaleidoscopic, brass-and-strings-and-kitchen-sink road-trip through Newman’s memories: “Slow motion heartache / compliments that landscape / on the train north to Leeds / painted over black night / slow motion landslide / street lights in towns I'll never see in day”.
A bittersweet, psychogeographic symphony? It’s the only way to close a truly exceptional album that manages to go out there while simultaneously hitting you in here.
