PRE PLEASURE

Album review

More than just about anyone else now, Julia Jacklin is the spiritual predecessor of Liz Phair. Like her—as well as contemporaries such as Faye Webster and Margaret Glaspy—Jacklin effortlessly exudes cerebral beauty with a pinch of salt, in the form of off-kilter humor and a lack of desperation to be cool. The Australian singer-songwriter's third album feels like a companion piece to early Phair records. "Magic" doesn't blush at all with the delivery of a sexed-up promise—"Put on something special/ I will meet you at the door/ Lead you to the bedroom/ Our clothes scattered down the hall/ I will feel adored tonight"—even as the alt-country music is appealingly kind of clunky, not suggestive, and the chorus is baldly sincere: "Ready to do magic/ Naked..." Like on Phair's first two records, "Be Careful With Yourself" glides on seductive bass (here from Ben Whiteley of the Weather Station), bright, chiming melodies and a chill muscularity (although, unlike with Phair's '90s output, this doesn't feel like there's something to prove; chalk it up to an evolution for "women in music"). Jacklin matter-of-factly pleads "Please stop smoking/ Want your life to last a long time," and it's just one lyrical instance of the realization that time is a bandit. On "Moviegoer," the high-in-the-mix drums act like a timekeeper, recording every second lost; when the music all drops out and Jacklin whispers, "If you can say it to a stranger/ You can call your sister later," it's chilling. She looks backward on the terrific "Lydia Wears A Cross," a paean to religious ambivalence while enjoying the baroque trappings of Catholicism. (Jacklin has said it's about "being a seven-year-old old Jesus Christ Superstar fanatic attending Catholic school trying to figure out which way is up.") "Seated in rows/ Knees and eyes closed I felt pretty/ In the shoes and the dress/ Confused by the rest could he hear me?" she sings, before admitting: "I'd be a believer/ If it was all just song and dance." Relaxed tracks "Ignore Tenderness" and "Love, Try Not to Let Go" offer a different kind of Sunday-morning meditation, rolling in like a gentle tide; the latter builds to a monster moment of crashing drums and guitar (that "song and dance" drama that appeals to Jacklin) even as she expresses a seemingly simplistic wish that's among the world's most complicated: "Love, love is all that I want now ... Time, time to figure some things out." And Jacklin—who has said that "A lot of the time I feel like I need to do all the work before I can enjoy my life"—stays gossamer while singing about fear of time and change on the bouncy "I Was Neon": "I was neon, I was the nearest door/ I was the sign that said you've been here before … I don't want to lose myself again." © Shelly Ridenour /Qobuz