Review Summary: All my dreams end violently
It’s often been claimed that the opposite of love isn’t hate, as commonly assumed, but rather indifference. After all, love and hate are simply sides of the same coin, passionate emotions channeled into different directions. Young Jesus’ latest album,
The Fool, is essentially a musical counterpart to that concept. It’s a record which I assess as flirting with brilliance, but the knife’s edge on which it rests also borders upon awfulness rather than mediocrity.
The Young Jesus catalog up to this point has covered a lot of ground. Early efforts, like 2012’s debut
Home, operated in the realm of emo/folk while being heavily influenced by The National, but by 2020’s
Welcome to Conceptual Beach, the music had morphed into a strange form of artsy prog/jazz. And that was all before 2022’s
Shepherd Head, at which point Young Jesus became simply a solo project for vocalist/guitarist John Rossiter and his new interest in trippy electronic textures. Against that complicated backdrop,
The Fool sees the Young Jesus brand reinvented once more.
In short, this latest batch of songs is the most singer-songwriter-y collection yet in the discography - heavy on piano balladry, even heavier on Rossiter’s voice and lyrics. Themes of guilt and redemption, and what it means to live in a good life in a broken world, predominate, and there’s a palpable darkness throughout. Everything is quite earnest, even if occasionally punctuated with bursts of humor. A listener’s level of enjoyment of the album will almost exclusively be determined by their tolerance of Rossiter himself - both the half-mad prophet persona he adopts and his vocal stylings. On that latter point, most of the time Rossiter’s gruff voice provides a poor man’s hipster Springsteen vibe, but on rare occasions he strains his (golden?) pipes beyond their capacity, to almost unbearable results. Lyrically, too, there’s a lot of threading the needle between the profound and the hamfisted (think “
true love is a little bit like hell” from “Two Brothers” or “
yeah the money was nice, it bought me a shrink” from “Rich”). All that is to say that finding the album to be deeply emotionally touching, or a total sonic atrocity, are both reactions I find quite viable.
Many of
The Fool’s finest moments come when the musical backdrops add depth and flavor to Rossiter’s stories - a la the combustible bar band rock of “Brenda & Diane”, the snarling slowcore/slacker rock guitar which periodically roils “Rabbit”, or the poppy electronic touches of “Am I the Only One”. More sparse songs often suffer in comparison - “The Weasel” and “Dancer” have plenty of potentially crushing lyrical content, but struggle to stand out due to their more one-dimensional nature. That said, this is an album which manages to cover a fair amount of sounds and moods - “Moonlight” manages to provide an uneasy, queasy sense of atmosphere while also incorporating a classic-sounding chorus, while “Sunrise” transforms itself from a beautiful beginning before becoming more and more unhinged, culminating in Rossiter howling “
think I’ll take the bus down to New Orleans, yeah I think I’ll buy some drugs”.
The grander pretensions which fuel
The Fool - religion, philosophy, what makes a “good life” - might sometimes feel either overwrought or underbaked, but it’s the bleeding heart behind them, the unvarnished sense of humanity, which ultimately makes me assess this album as a flawed success rather than flaming mess - indeed, I’d say the concepts are ultimately “wrought” and “baked” just right. There are plenty of moments here which are simply spectacular, as Rossiter delivers a particular line in just the right way at just the right time - the final words of the aforementioned “Brenda & Diane” are a fine example - “
I just kept drivin’ on” over gentle piano, the whole moment full of pathos. But it’s the closer “God’s Plan” which spells out the album’s vision most clearly, its slow and lumbering arrangement allowing Rossiter’s musings to shine. The attempts at wit are great (“
I made a joke about communion, how it must’ve been something he ate” gets a wry grin out of me every time), but the overall tone is deadly serious, and by the time of the album’s last lines are delivered, I never feel like I’m left unscathed.
The Fool is a record filled with a sense of intensity, an almost unnerving feeling that its creator had a lot to say that simply had to get out. Whether it’s any good is for you to decide, but love it or hate it, I think you’ll feel
something.
