In the early-to-mid 2000s, unconventional, long-form song structures became something of a trend in North American indie rock, which created resonances with the flashy, epic-poetic progressive rock of the 1970s. The music of Leeds-based quartet Adult Jazz recalls this (now somewhat unfashionable) approach; their debut album, Gist Is, is full of formally convoluted songs which seldom run shy of five minutes, and feature plenty of brisk, ponderous guitar figures and difficult-to-parse drumbeats. However, the album’s complexity is the brushwork rather than the subject described; a gentle flow of melismatic, often beautiful melody takes center stage and provides the band's compositions with a necessary unifying element.
It’s often easy to discern Adult Jazz's base of contemporary influences. Opener "Hum", with its blue-eyed soul aspirations and vocal processing, recalls Bon Iver's most recent album, while the histrionic vocalizations on more angular and dissonant tracks ("Donne Tongue", "Be A Girl") invites comparisons to like-minded British iconoclasts Wild Beasts. However, the band eventually refract and re-contextualize even their most familiar-sounding gestures, leaving room to showcase plenty of their own signature tics. Lead singer Harry Burgess usually doubles or extends his meandering, plainchant-like vocal melodies on guitar rather than providing them with chordal support (on "Am Gone," the technique closely resembles the signature scat-alongs of adult-contemporary jazz favorite George Benson). Meanwhile, the sporadic, acerbic percussion remains affectively detached from the slickness of the rest of the ensemble, and compellingly dense.
There are also jarring interjections from sampled, electro-or-acoustic reeds, horns, strings, harp and vocals—their processed quality sometimes evokes the pitch-shifted trumpet work of Eno/David Sylvian collaborator and avant-New Ager Jon Hassell. However, these gestures provide mere coloration; the base arrangement is always skeletal. Frequently, there are passages of just two or three instruments playing at once, and the full force of the entire ensemble is used sparingly. This allows Adult Jazz to maintain powerfully restrained dynamics when desired, as on the muted “Pigeon Skulls,” which mixes deft, Richard Thompson-esque acoustic guitar picking with disconnected wisps of vocal melody.
For the most part, Adult Jazz avoid the typical gambits of the post-Funeral Indie Rock Song; songs end abruptly, like their allotted time is up, without heavy-handed catharsis or blaring, tacked-on codas. The one exception to this is ten-minute album centerpiece “Spook”, which closes with an extended section attempting unsuccessfully to deliver some tom-heavy, Peter Gabriel-esque gravitas. The song’s three or four movements mix somewhat pat chord structures with nondescript vocal licks, and ultimately the track comes across like a jambalaya of undeveloped sketches—juxtaposed without meaningful connective tissue.
Another element of Gist Is that may be initially difficult to stomach is its lyrics__,__ which read something like a collection of Gertrude Stein poems (“Bold claim to taste a feel in felt/ To ham it up, the heart’s a sore/ For babies sake and nothing more”). Sentences sometimes go unfinished, devolving into nonsense and half-words. However, the gibberish often proves to be just as expressive as the cogent language: colorful, motormouth ululations represent Burgess’ addressee “going on and on” in “Am Gone,” and the vocal tracks on “Idiot Mantra” are cleverly scrambled, reversed, or crudely cut off mid-phrase to evoke its eponymous sound. One of Burgess’ discernible themes is the fundamental difficulty and ineffectuality of communication (“It’s all in aphorisms/ I was just believing myself slowly/ And the feeling changed”), so when the band engages in this type of onomatopoeia and word painting, it seems appropriate and makes for some of the album’s most memorable moments.
Ultimately, the primary appeal of Adult Jazz’s music is in its unique and playful syntax, which is neither indulgently collage-like or remotely predictable. Their sound is not revolutionary, but nonetheless wholly distinctive—and nowadays, this seems a hard bargain for any rock band to strike. Gist Is is full of clever turns of musical and lyrical phrase which will dispel possible accusations of self-indulgence and pretension, and somehow, within just a few listens, it becomes easy to enjoy this unusually paced album of so few easy hooks, and so many seemingly insignificant words.
