notes on Julia Jacklin’s pre pleasure

(A whistle-stop breakdown)

Julia Jacklin’s pre pleasure gives me the kind of sweet-loving promised by a childhood blanket – it lives in a corner of my mind, undisturbed. Every so often I hold on to it for a little while, for comfort.

The first time I listened to Pre Pleasure was when I was Neon came on my shuffle as I walked to work on a Saturday morning. ‘I was the neon, I was the floodlight/ Arms out reaching for everything insight’ – the second single left me quiet, nostalgic, and stunned. In the relaxed, informal admission of ‘Am I gonna lose myself again?/ I quite like the person that I am’, it confronts the ambiguity in evolution, the loss of clarity considered in becoming an adult (if there is such a thing, as we never truly stop being children, do we?). For me, Jacklin balances a curiosity and confidence that I find to be intensely disturbing yet painfully accurate.

The emotional depth of this album provided me with the ability to detach and assess relationships. This album fully mirrors the emotional dip felt by pre-teens and teenagers without any intention to – the years of picking at skin and opening acne peels. She conveys this longing for maturity; like the hallucinatory feeling of sitting in the corner of your room at 2am with one of those mini disco ball projectors plugged into your phone, shining into your stomach.

Though quantifying it, I can never do it justice (this I believe to be some kind of beauty for music and poetry). I shall attempt to write (somewhat) eloquently, though with albeit rather clunky comparisons. Thus follows, my incoherent and largely esoteric ramblings on this meaningful album:

PRE-PLEASURE

Lydia Wears A Cross
Love, Try Not To Let Go
Ignore Tenderness
I was Neon
Too in Love to Die
Less of a Stranger
Moviegoer
Magic
Be Careful With Yourself
End of a Friendship

Lydia Wears A Cross

The opening track from Jacklin’s third album is a lyrically beautiful narrative, a girl’s attempt to reason with her environment. Despite her parents being non-religious Jacklin talks of attending a religious primary school, grappling with the instructional morals offered to her, the aftereffects of this are evident. Surrounded and attached to faith though not connected by any spiritual form ‘I’d be a believer if it was all just song and dance’. In retrospect, Jacklin looks back; despite the song’s agnosticism and even the forgiveness she holds for her younger self, she tells of the mere actions she goes through ‘Seated in rows/knees and eyes closed I felt pretty/in shoes and the dress/confused by the rest, could he hear me?’. Coloured by her perspective wisdom of growing up, there belies a need for validation, a loss of autonomy and the ‘naivety of a devout childhood’ (Lucy Facer) – (‘Vivien’s holding on but singing every single word wrong’). A further dichotomy is presented: ‘Arms raised, at every assembly/little sirens singing their songs/where have the babies gone’. It grounds the song in uncertainty and introspection. The sirens and the babies uncover a rift of moral sexual ideals and a consequent solitude echoed in the close yearning of simplicity amongst the inability to form your own judgement.

Watching the Apple TV series Dickinson (a show which I became increasingly engrossed with over the summer, due to its beautiful creative courage and generosity as well as its jousting humour) it reminded me of a scene where Emily confides in Maggie, the household maid she talks to, of her experiences with religion. The line “It was not that I did not want to find God” strikes me, because it seems to subvert any expectation and idea of a rebellious and steadfast teenager the show had painted Emily to be. It makes it me think – “perhaps it was because he did not want to find me” (I know, all too apt to the style of the 19th century cult poet). It also reminds me of her poem ‘A little madness in spring’ maybe all just some ‘whole experiment of green’. Lydia wears a cross is an expressive ballad, returning to the innocence of a child, the jarring beat and electric guitar seems to permeate my brain every time.

‘A little madness in Spring’ by Emily Dickinson

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown –
Who ponders this tremendous scene –
This whole Experiment of Green –
As if it were his own!

Ignore Tenderness

‘You know how they season fries with paprika? I feel like a fry tossed in glitter glue.’ This is what my friend first said to me when she heard this song. We lay on the floor of her bedroom with the lights out – to fully ‘experience’ the emotional welt of it. Ellie Robinson of NME wrote that “the material here is some of Jacklin’s most intense, never holding back with her gut-punching ruminations on religion, sex and trauma”. It talks of Jacklin’s moral push and pull: ‘Right when pleasure begins my education creeps in’. Opening by directly stating ‘I’ve been trying to, be turned on by you’ the song adopts a tone of confrontation and startling confession. My favourite part though, remains: ‘Leave no room for doubt that you are brave/a little leaf catching a wave’ – the chimes, a perfect underscoring. With the playfulness of Quinine and ironically reminiscent of Indigo De Souza’s Boys, this song is cluttered with imagery – ‘a plastic bucket or a grave’/ ‘ who said you’re not what you get, you are what you gave away’ cutting rhyme, and the intimacy of self-reflection.

I Was Neon

I was steady, I was soft to the touch
Cut wide open did I let in too much
I swear I could feel it’

‘Am I gonna lose myself again
I quite like the person that I am’

Not much to say on this one! This song makes me float. I want to listen to it again and again and again until my bone marrow is replaced with this quiet confidence that makes me feel so strong. I want to feel this song coursing through my bloodstream and make it a point to at least once every two weeks. When I hear the words ‘arms out reaching everything in sight’, I only think of some cultish mosh pit, which is simultaneously exciting and ethereal, yet makes my skin utterly crawl. ‘I was the sign that said, you’ve been here before’ describes the complete comfort of occupying a liminal space in a relationship (with a small r), where both are lacking in communication, hesitant and resistant, despite everything being underlying and acknowledged indirectly. It’s the kind of song that plays in the background at a house party whilst you’re taking a break in the kitchen, and it reminds me of a similar gorgeous monologue from Frances Ha – because you know you’re both already shining.

Moviegoer

Moviegoer’s 20 dollars down
Love to throw their film knowledge about the workplace
Movie director is going down too
20 million dollars, still nobody understands you

The family dog is younger, with a healthy liver
They can run real fast, this time avoid the cars

Moviegoer touches on the loneliness of secluded urban life, which haunts this track. The strong desire to find meaning in art haunts this track (deeply ironic of this article) eradicating it in itself. The staging of connection, the farce of film is evident as ‘it opens with a wide shot’. These lyrics don’t just convey the idealistic and commercialised, perfection of a film set but inhabit the same world and its external cost ‘Movie director is going down too’. Particularly haunting is the way that 20 dollars and 20 million dollars increases to 40.

End of a friendship

‘Woke up to hear her say that she couldn’t stand it that she couldn’t stay
Out here on the road, it didn’t feel right
She listed the things about me she didn’t like
I sat there in silence, accepted our fate
We always found it hard to relate
To what we both want and what we both need
And who we both want to be

All my love is spinning round the room
If only it would land, plant and bloom’

The perfect song to end the album, out of all Jacklin’s songs, this may be my favourite. There is a beauty in the transient emotional release at 1.47 which creates a sense of urgency, brought out by the waltz – consequently elevated at 2.07 by the strings. Through her emotional beats – ‘we don’t have to agree all the time’, Jacklin hits the sensitive tenderness of tumultuous friendships. ‘All my love is spinning round the room’ ‘if only it would land on something soon’ ‘but all my words are cut up in a cloud’ ‘you know someday you’ll have to say them out loud’. The elongated time spent waiting and wondering, dealing with concepts so abstract, they become fluid. To me she pinpoints the precise dissonance of how friendship becomes something more, yet also at the base of it merely a disconnect all too human. The confused, cluttered yet still small and very beautiful, something overwhelming you cradle in your hands.

In writing this article, I have listened to this album more times than I can count, and I have loved every second of it. Julia Jacklin grasps something transient and deeply ephemeral in her diffused bass lines and ‘neon’ electric guitar, a drum kit that firms the melody as trudging teenage boots – (Doc Martens or otherwise) with a candid lyricism that blends desperation with confidence.