Jlin's debut album Dark Energy felt like a keyhole peek into a bedroom producer's mind. In the broad array of vocal and synth samples, off-beat time signatures that varied from song to song, and even within the song itself, the conjunction of tens of ideas competing for dominance, you could hear a singular aesthetic being forged. One can imagine Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) spent hours crafting the music in a way that spoke to her.
On her new EP, Free Fall, this same excitement is still at work, though not in a manner as excitingly weird as Dark Energy. Dark Energy was a record for the individual, feeling more at home for solo listening than in a club setting*. Free Fall* feels like a tribute to the sounds that brought her to where she is. It is critical that these tracks are gathered on a single EP; it's not that they don't have a place in her larger oeuvre, but they also feel distinctly familiar in a way that Dark Energy did not. But because Patton is still smarter than almost any of her peers, it means that Free Fall creates the kind of thrills that only she can provide. The EP builds to peaks that grip the heart in a joyful vice; the listener will feel both excited and overwhelmed and unsure which emotion to embrace over the other.
Certain songs elicit this feeling more than others. "Eu4ria", like the aptly named "Guantanamo" from her debut, layers piercing screams and yells to create a horror-laden universe in three minutes. The track also sounds connected to Dark Energy closer "Abnormal Restriction", as definitive a statement about Patton's musical identity as you'll get. Populated with samples of Faye Dunaway's turn as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, "Abnormal Restriction" added a blood-freezing exclamation point to the end of the album. "Eu4ria" is lighter; Patton sampled an iconic phrase from the original film version of Stephen King's Carrie. "They're all gonna laugh at you," Carrie's mother yelled to her daughter in the film. Here, the phrase is interspersed in a frenetic beat that transforms it from a cry of anger and desperation to one of defiance.
"I Am the Queen" and "BuZilla" are two biting pieces of footwork that don't let up and shouldn't. It's not the sometimes lovely structural sonics of classic Chicago South Side footwork. Instead, like the EP itself, the tracks push things into weirder realms of aural storytelling in a matter of minutes. "BuZilla" reuses the phrase "live and let die." The longer one listens to the track, the more it feels like a call that refuses to wait for a response. Whatever happens will happen. Patton will continue to create regardless. It's an aggressive and focused answer to her "genre." Whereas Dark Energy was fueled by a personal, cinematic vision of doom, Free Fall is an invigorating wash of sounds, a collection of ideas that meld together the past with Patton's present to form another hard-won and potent artistic statement.
