Weekend – ‘Jinx’ album review: darker yet more melodic
Guitarist Kevin Johnson recalls Weekend’s debut album Sports, released in 2010 as a decade in the offing ‘cathartic release of energy and songs’. Born in gritty post-punk and swathed in shoegaze, it probably should have accumulated greater fame, considering the recent success of similar acts like Diiv and Beach Fossils, the latter releasing their debut album the same year as Weekend. Regardless, Weekend’s sophomore release, Jinx, is a darker yet more melodic output. It originates in vocalist Shaun Durkan’s recovery from a family bereavement, which caused him to pass six months in therapy, and an intriguing move by Weekend to Brooklyn with its already glutted music scene.
The band’s employment of a wider range of melodies in Sports is epitomised by ‘Celebration FL’, which sees their most noticeable break from harmonies suffocated in shoegaze. Now, distortion and effect pedals are merely used to soften the pristine finish of 1980s synth and brisk guitar, which could otherwise run off into a sound not dissimilar to the cloying ’90s techno-pop of songs like ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. ‘Rosaries’ also oozes synth: shoegaze is usurped by subtle distortion, the creeping echo of vocals dissolving into the song’s melodies. That said, in general, shoegaze still rules unbroken over the album’s tracks, if not a mellower sort, which renders this glossy pair of singles outcasts in Jinx.
When the effect pedals are used, they are used to veil and reveal. Jinx, its title prior to listening, casting the album in a gloom, emerged from the circumstances of bereavement, and the songs have a clear sensitivity to revelation and concealment.
Opener, ‘Mirror’, uses synth in the tradition of Joy Division, creating despair-filled, introspective sounds, vocals lost within them. The only sentence that surfaces above the shoegaze is “I feel sick, sick, sick, in my heart”. If you need clarification of the album’s mood, ‘Oubliette’ is the song best lending itself to a single, also most succinctly capturing the album’s despair. An “Oubliette”, literally translating “forgotten place”, is a dungeon, but with its closeness to “oublier” (to forget), a paradox is created: the intention to forget is entrapment.
Its tone is atmospheric; the sound borrows heavily from the lo-fi, neo-shoegaze of Diiv and Beach Fossils – may also be the reason why it lends itself so well to a single release. However, unlike Beach Fossils, whose melodies so often teeter on the edges of Major and Minor, ‘Oubliette’ has only despair: the most apparent vocals are ‘Last place last place’ repeated incessantly in monotone.
There is a reason that Weekend’s “influences” section on their Facebook page reads: ‘Love+Death’: where more do the themes of despair, revelation and concealment belong that Jinx touches? The album’s problem is identity: shoegaze and post-punk are saturated, and the album navigates through the array of its influences so freely that it plays like a “Best of post-punk and shoegaze and neo-shoegaze and psychedelia” compilation album.
The Horrors, My Bloody Valentine, Splashh, and The Stone Roses (add to at your convenience). Yet Jinx doesn’t merely appropriate. It reworks and improves these sounds: what you can’t deny is that, more often than not, the sound that Weekend reap is better than its seed.
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