The Blaze – ‘Jungle’ review
We know remarkably little about The Blaze. Retaining such a mysterious aura must be pretty tricky considering the ambient house duo are set to perform at some of the biggest festivals in the world later this year, including Coachella. The Blaze – comprised of cousins Guillaume and Jonathan Alric – are clearly determined not to distract their listeners from their highly cerebral brand of club music. With their sophomore album, Jungle, they’ve crafted something certain to send your tiny human heart into overdrive.
Following the release of their debut album Dancehall, The Blaze embarked on an extensive world tour: ” we spent four years playing live shows around the world and the experience marked us deeply,” they said, announcing the album last year. Ever since they’ve been writing music and “thinking about sharing it live” “We were willing to keep the introspective aspect our music carries,” they explained, “while keeping in mind that people also come to dance when they see us perform.”
All that thinking has completely altered The Blaze’s sound. Where Dancehall was warped, angular and unwieldy, Jungle is smooth as a slab of sanded marble. The tracks on their debut almost all featured pitched-down Jamie XX ‘Oh My Gosh’ style vocals, which have now been replaced by dense layers of cathedralesque falsetto. The ethereal opening track, ‘Lullaby’, lays the foundation for everything that follows. A piano loop reminiscent of John Adams’ ‘Hallelujah Junction‘ provides the shale over which sloped waves of choral melody rock back and forth. Then come the gated 808s, that perennial hallmark of deep house, which pull the listener out of this embryonic bliss and throws them, heart-racing, onto the dancefloor.
This is an album built for late-night drives with friends by your side. From ‘CLASH’ onwards, Jungle bristles with the energy of a glimmering city in constant motion. In ‘Dreamer’, mellow synth progressions provide an enveloping foundation for cavernous vocals that seem to erupt from somewhere far beneath your feet. It’s one of the many tracks on Jungle that belies Guillaume and Jonathan Alric’s raison d’etre: to open the listener’s soul and then hammer their body with a hard-hitting beat. Texture is always number one on their agenda. While they rely on the undulating (and frequently predictable) structures essential to EDM music, they’re never just building and releasing tension; they’re simultaneously juxtaposing textures, feeding subglacial bass arpeggios into scattered rimshots and long-tailed delays.
By the time ‘LONELY’ rolls around, it feels a bit like The Blaze have run out of ideas, having limited themselves to a very specific sonic palette. The uniformity of the tracks on Jungle isn’t all that surprising considering they all boast single-word titles written in caps, which, in their evocation of particular images and emotional states, give the tracklist the air of a high-brow perfume catalogue.
If The Blaze, like ambient pioneer Brian Eno, are seeking to craft music that alters the mood in the same way perfume enters and alters the ambience of a space, then they’ve succeeded. The music on Jungle has an irresistible dynamism, and it often feels as though that music has entered you and is massaging your cerebral cortex. But like all perfumes, it’s only new once. After that, it become part of the furniture, at which point one feels a real need to rest, reset and return.
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