Eden has traditionally been portrayed as a magical garden with a gal, a guy, a snake, and an apple ruining all life for eternity for everyone. But what if it was actually a rural farm on the border of England and Wales, with sheep and hens and teenagers getting rat-drunk on Baileys, listening to Kanye on a hill, and singing a song called “Dubstep in My Trousers,” and it’s so good and breezy that you can stay all week—so good that you never look at your primitive Nokia—and breakfast is always sweet but morning never actually comes?
This is paradise as Joscelin Dent-Pooley conjures it on his second album as Jerskin Fendrix, more or less as he experienced it growing up in remote Shropshire in the late 2000s. Never mind his life today as an Oscar-nominated composer who scored Yorgos Lanthimos’ last three films and got Emma Stone to star in one of his latest videos; he still sings about these Elysian scenes of bumpkin teen life with such earnest reverence, in a cavernous voice perhaps more naturally suited to playing Hades on Broadway, that you can hardly imagine anything better. His pristinely vivid world becomes as poignant as your own memories, whether you were a city kid or you have (as we once did out in the sticks) at some stage raised a temporary barn to party in. But this pretty side of the record—the cuckoo clock vocal chirrups and chamber elegance of opener “Beth’s Farm” keeping Fendrix’s lavish crooning buoyant—feels like a harbinger of the rot inside every shiny apple, even before he repeatedly sings “and nobody dies on Beth’s farm,” like singing it could make it real.
Fendrix wrote Once Upon a Time... in Shropshire after experiencing the suicide of a close childhood friend and the sudden, unexpected loss of his father. Death stalks his songs. Sometimes its presence is metaphysical, as if he’s certain in the belief of something beyond human comprehension: “Are you still alive somewhere in the universe?” he asks on the choirboy-tender plea “The Universe.” Other times, his beloved landscape becomes symbolic of lost loved ones: “The river rises,” he sings in a weary growl on “Last Night in Shropshire,” “and inch by inch we let you down.” Sometimes death is just death: “Fuck I’m buzzing, I’ve been drinking so much White Claw,” he sings with skulking malevolence on “King Lear.” “Who will call to say you died?”
Grief twists Fendrix’s bucolic, borderline Regency reminiscences into absurdist pastorals. The darker side of the record is high on a kind of godlike wrath that chews down worlds, sardonic, rattled, and blazing in its devastation; the closest analogs I can think of to these freakouts are the barely contained sleaze of Mr. Bungle or Morphine. It might not occur to you to blend brawny swagger with dissonant horns, a rap-rock acrostic interlude spelling out “J-E-R-S-K-I-N,” and the vocal stylings of a manic street preacher scatting about washing his dick in the sink, as Fendrix does on the stupefying “Jerskin Fendrix Freestyle.” But if you have grieved, then you’ve felt your blood boil with the same awful futility that fuels this song. It’s too wet to call such a unique album “relatable,” but its slippage of beauty into rot, of what seem like fable-like symbols suddenly being revealed as nothing but mundane disappointments, perfectly captures the raving terror of loss.
Fendrix is obviously virtuosic (not for nothing is Black Midi drummer Morgan Simpson at the helm on several songs) and the maximalist extremes of Once Upon a Time are undoubtedly an acquired taste. But unlike with, y’know, Black Midi, virtuosity never feels like the point. Fendrix leans into ridiculousness, stretching his camp baritone through sudden lurches and grimaces, squeezing the last drop of juice out of his words. “I think it’s very important to sound as embarrassing as possible,” he told Crack of his singing style, “because it’s hard to tell the truth if everything sounds too pretty.” On “Together Again,” over piano chords that evoke a saccharine ’80s Christmas song, he lunges at words as if taking a running jump to clear a ravine. To the swooping bass and flickering handclaps of “Sk2,” he inflates like villain-man becoming monster-thing in a Disney film, petulant with despondence: “You live! You live! You live! I don’t,” he howls in accusation, then offers a threat that’s as incoherent as it is oddly heartbreaking: “I’ll cruise ’til Christmas/But after that, it’s Booze ’til Pissedmas!”
On paper this may sound like a man making a mockery of his feelings. But once you’re used to our delirious narrator and his disarming hairpin turns, the gentleness of Fendrix’s heart overpowers everything, even the teeth-grinding thrash that concludes “Princess.” In that song, he tries to use his love to wrestle sunrise into submission, but inevitably fails. On “Together Again,” hope is “a new fat baby/To load onto the boat/He is sweet like a raisin/He is soft like an oat.” Fendrix is a sentimentalist with the whole wide world in his hands. To the twinkly piano of “The Universe,” he gives an all-time summation of friendship, naturally while hurling himself into certain words:
“Sometimes I get sad when I’m extremely drunk
But everyone is always very niiiiiiiiice when I do
Maybe everyone else doooooeees too
Which is why we all get drunk at the very saaaaaaaame time”
His earnestness is beautiful. “Last Night in Shropshire,” the final and most unvarnished song, would work as a true eulogy—an especially lovely one that hymns “the fire of love, the sacred pint/The endless incandescent light.” Late in the song, you can hear a recording of his late father playing cello—and, finally, the raucous “When the Saints”-style “Dubstep in My Trousers” friend singalong in full. But first, Fendrix taxonomizes the people and places where “my heart was built” to bright, delicate piano that sounds like the first glints of daylight breaking through. Dawn has finally won, and his Eden must fade. His outrageously wonderful tribute to it makes you grateful that it made him, too.
