- When you blow the world away with your debut album, it can be hard to top the expectations pushed on you and often your second record falls flat. However, Australian indie-folk artist Julia Jacklin has surpassed that stigma with her follow up record, Crushing. It’s a ten track album stacked to the brim with soul-crushing ballads about life, love and loneliness.
The record as a whole is an intricate look at heartbreak and infatuation and all of the emotions that bridge the journey between the two. Album opener Body weaves through the narrative of a destructive relationship; the disjointed melody and abstract song structure further cementing the uneasiness that the lyrics dictate. A lagging snare leaves you lingering for each beat, wondering what the next lyric will bring, until Jacklin leaves the five-minute-long track with the unsettling line “it's just my body, I guess it's just my life”.
Mostly voiced with reverb drenched, jangly electric guitar and tambourine, each track on the record sits in a similar place, timbre-wise, but the varying urgency in Jacklin's vocals across each number make every one a different chapter in the narrative. The pure talent in her voice, delivery and lyricism makes you forgive any similarities in her arrangements. However, the standout deepcut from the record is When The Family Flies In: the only piano ballad on the record and an ode to the lost friend immortalised in the title track of her debut record Don’t Let The Kids Win. The sheer simplicity of the mid-record ballad is haunting. In every break in her vocals you can hear the heartbreak bleed out, slipping through the finelyl-executed cracks.
If you’ve ever felt like your heart is gripped in a vice, being squeezed till it bursts, then you’ll understand where Julia Jacklin is coming from with Crushing. Devastatingly beautiful, melancholic and bittersweet, this record is, finally, comforting, like a good cry in your childhood bed, curled up in the dark with your dog. Cathartic and relatable, Jacklin has created the atmospheric soundtrack to the inescapable loneliness of life.
- Olivia Shoesmith.