An exercise tape counts off at the top of Move Like You Do, some brisk anonymous voice, and then the bassline shows up and does that rubbery Jungle thing where the groove leans a fraction ahead of the drums and dares you to keep still. Four bars and you know whose record this is. Twelve years of that now, since Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland started assembling tracks in London out of chopped soul, disco bass and dancers doing the promotional labour their faces refused to.
Sunshine is the first album made with Lydia Kitto as a full member instead of the voice they kept calling back, and it shows up structurally. She fronts the title track, Carry On, Reflection and the closer. Those stacked harmonies that used to live down inside the production now have somebody standing in front of them. Carry On drops the tempo and lets a jazz feel into the chords while Kitto sings something plainly confessional over the glossiest arrangement on the record, a pairing that should curdle and instead becomes the most disarming thing here.
The group chant is everywhere. Title track, then Someday, Somewhere, then Reflection. On Sunshine it earns the repetition, the keys pinging out a bright, almost toy-like figure before the whole arrangement swells past them, the hook doing exactly the job a hook is hired for. Three songs later it has stopped being a decision. Reflection has Kitto laying out her own flaws and her doubts about a lover, and a room full of voices singing along underneath that is a strange piece of staging.
Come Back To Me opens the album on hand percussion and a loose Afrobeat swing, deliberately retro, the vocal held back long enough that the rhythm has to carry the first stretch by itself. New-crush song. Nobody in this band has ever been embarrassed about writing one.
Bas turns up on Romeo ii, two albums into an actual working relationship after Pretty Little Thing, and the fit is better this time. A high, thin sample opens the door, the instrumental gets chopped down to soul debris, and he walks in swaggering about missed connections and the one that got away. It is the one moment on Sunshine where the record sounds slightly unpredictable, which is a strange thing to say about a guest verse.
The Wave goes to Brazil, 60s and 70s rhythm underneath a soul-jazz base, and it is the most intoxicating stretch on the record. The refrain is a steadying one, about keeping your feet when everything around them is going. Set against Where Are You Now?, which builds off a tambourine of all things before the chorus opens it out, you can hear how carefully this band now controls its own temperature. Nothing overheats.
That control is the argument against the record too. Volcano already showed how much further this band could push, and Sunshine mostly chooses not to, eleven tracks and a little over half an hour of refinement rather than reach. Natural is charismatic, some genuinely good guitar playing under a refrain that will not leave. It is also the fourth or fifth time the album has made the same offer. Then Heavy On My Soul arrives almost entirely acoustic, barely three minutes long, reaching after a light that keeps moving away, and the groove the previous ten songs were built on simply is not there. Kitto sounds better with less around her. Somebody should have noticed that earlier in the sequence.
They bring it to Place Bell on September 13, which is where an album like this is actually meant to land, in a room of ten thousand people who came to move. I interviewed the band a few years back and have caught them live here in Montreal before, so I will admit my bias going in: I have been looking forward to this one for months. Jungle have been one of the most fun live acts in the world for a couple of years now, and this material is engineered to prove it again. Whether that reads as ambition or maintenance depends on how generous you are feeling on a given afternoon, but that argument tends to evaporate the moment the bass drops in a room this size.
Sunshine is out now via AWAL.
Photo Credit: Mason Rose
Share this :
