On 2011’s Brother Loyola, Jessica Jalbert asserted that "I’m not the records that I own, and I’m not the things I’m good at." That those points needed making says plenty about the Edmonton songwriter, who’s since refined her '60s-styled indie-pop under the Faith Healer alias. Jalbert, who seems both assured and self-scrutinizing, sidelines in the kind of record-collecting, plainclothes punk bands who covet the Troggs over the Pistols, which frees up her solo work to dive into her daydreamy subconscious. On Cosmic Troubles, her second solo album, she shares private epiphanies and stares at her bedroom ceiling as the universe unravels.
Recorded with longtime collaborator Renny Wilson in his parents’ makeshift basement studio, Cosmic Troubles sounds every bit as excitable and debut-fresh as Brother Loyola. It meanders calmly from in thrall to enthralling, and enjoys the trip—by the chorus of "Canonized", Jalbert and Wilson are playfully excavating White Album-era Beatles via the shambling exuberance of the Raincoats, and it sounds fantastic. If there’s little impetus to write great songs that don’t sound like other great songs—usually, it transpires, songs by the Velvet Underground—the references rarely grate; it’s a record that keeps its influences close, like childhood toys under the bed, in a way that’s reassuring rather than cumbersome.
For much of the album Jalbert sings in a calmly vacated tone. Her demeanor is neither ingenuous nor jaded, and she has the dreamy air of somebody who’d spend therapy sessions psychoanalyzing her shrink. Despite the record’s rigorous self-analysis, Jalbert owns her self-consciousness, and applies it on her own terms. Sometimes it becomes a principle ingredient. "Fools Rush In" embodies the narrator’s hypercritical subconscious in a taunting Beach Boys harmony: "I'm so stupid, ba-ba-ba." "Again" taps into the goldmine of whimsy that links neuroses and laundry—"It’s a pain to stretch yourself out after being through the wash"—while "Angel Eyes", conventional but no less enchanting, opens its heart with the unrelenting steadiness of Leonard Cohen and Angel Olsen. For all its stylistic play, the record’s tenor is uniformly self-certain.
So it’s all the more alarming when it cracks. The title track, for one, is musically on-point, with haunting echoes of Jefferson Airplane. But its words depict a domestic dispute in stark terms: "I was out of my mind with my hands around my neck/ You raised yours to slap them off, and I raised mine out to protect." After the heavenly "Infinite Return", "No Car" kicks up a heavy riff, before describing a recent breakup from which the partner’s fingers are "bruised into my flesh."
In these fragments Jalbert’s songwriting seems to crystallise, her gentle dredging a way to send you fathoms deep into her mind without having to follow all the way. At times it sounds like, having grown out of nihilism, Jalbert is reaching for the nearest tune to get lost in, her stories a psychic sojourn on the route home to oblivion. By the time you return to "Fools Rush In", where she slides from lackadaisical soul-searching into idle contemplations of suicide-by-drowning, Cosmic Troubles sounds a sadder, vaster album than before, but one whose meditations can soothe your bones like an inviting stream.
