Pillowland

Where Jam City’s 2013 album *Club Constructions, Vol. 6* helped define the futuristic sound of the UK’s Night Slugs label, his 2015 follow-up, *Dream a Garden*, looked backward, swapping club music’s shuddering kicks and chrome-plated textures for an ’80s-inspired palette of flanged guitars and LinnDrum thwacks. Swathed in ambient synths and Jam City’s airy vocals, it sounded like a chopped-and-screwed take on vintage electro-funk, and with *Pillowland*, he takes that woozily retro aesthetic even further. Equal parts Prince and shoegaze, the album is a strawberry-flavored whirlwind of contrasting textures, pouring sticky-sweet Rhodes keys into brittle synth drums and blistering distortion, and topping it all off with his own quavering falsetto. Along the way, he touches on reference points a world away from his roots in Chicago house and Jersey club. The title track drips slow-motion funk from a reflecting pool of Steely Dan-inspired keys; the hi-def psych of “Cartwheel” could almost be Tame Impala. And while “They Eat the Young” is swaggering glam pop with spangles to spare—imagine Scritti Politti on a sugar bender—“Baby Desert Nobody” dials back to spare guitar and murmured voice. Somewhere in between those two poles lies “I Don’t Want to Dream About It Anymore,” perhaps the crux of the whole project—a pastel-streaked take on indie pop that wraps sotto-voce sincerity in gloriously over-the-top trappings.

After a tumultuous 5-year absence, Jam City returns with his long awaited third full length album, Pillowland. Written under the influence of living in America, Pillowland lounges spreadeagle between the plaintive, bit-crushed psychedelia of Dream A Garden, and the bass-heavy, slow motion productions of the beloved Earthly mixtapes, bringing you 10 scorch’d, carnival-esque hallucinations of Pop-Rock Fantasy that make up his strongest work to date. Channeling a period of doubt, pain, confusion and change in the artists personal life, Pillowland seeks refuge in the sugar-sweet amphetamine rush of the Pop dreamscape. It explores those starry fantasies which are promised but never fulfilled; the glistening, celluloid fantasies of a life filled with glamour, meaning and purpose that hover permanently on our ever-shrinking horizon. Desire itself is ingested like an illicit substance, then excavated with a perverse glee and a knowing sensitivity that mark a huge leap forward for the artist. From the sunny, intoxicating thrills of Sweetjoy to the narcotic, 12-string dream-pop of Cartwheel, the gaudy, crunching Future-Glam of They Eat The Young, to the heart-felt, dopamine-depleted I Don’t Wanna Dream About it Anymore, Jam City joyfully drowns in sounds somewhere between 1972 and 2020, gleefully playing with genre conventions like a child in a makeup box. Playing the part of the crooning, fake-Rock dreamer, he gazes over the rainbow but is barely able to look outside the window. Pretty, pleading melodies ache for some un-nameable fix to smother that awful reality: that the dream is truly dead. But these songs come not so much from the squandered expectations of generations, but rather a deep, gut-level belief in something more than this life... Back in the smoggy metropolis, far from Pillowlands golden gates, the spectral post-2008 shopping center that haunted Classical Curves makes its return:“ I was back in my old haunt, escaping an unseasonably hot day in there, and I passed an old man wearing a Brian Jones T-shirt and looked sad. Over the tannoy Chicago’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ echo’d and it moved me close to tears. I had never heard a dream so convincing, and so out of reach”. As the sweeping, Giallo-drenched synth strings of Cherry play out the end credits, Pillowland finally finds it’s bitter-sweet salvation; the gates of the palace swing open, and you are invited finally step inside. The cool air-conditioning licks your face. Doomed to spend eternity behind the gates, you find yourself quarantined in Heaven itself, forever.