The word "psychedelic" is often used to describe the music of Jennifer Gentle, an inevitability when you take your name from a Syd Barrett lyric. But in the case of this Italian outfit, the word is really just being used as another term for "weird." The defining qualities of psychedelia-- out-of-body transcendence, hallucinations, altered states of perception-- don't really factor into the experience of listening to The Midnight Room, Jennifer Gentle's second Sub Pop release. The album's backstory certainly proposes a supernatural subtext: after parting ways with long-time collaborator Alessio Gastaldello, founding member Marco Fasolo sequestered himself in a home studio where, according to legend (or record company bio), a prior owner had killed himself. The result is a hermetic, claustrophobic recording that, rather than distort the reality of your surroundings, makes you hyper-aware of them-- not unlike a sleepless night where every creak and squeak in the dark seems to pierce your ears and heighten the sense of panic.
Given the grim history of Fasolo's recording space, it's appropriate that The Midnight Room opens with a song called "Twin Ghosts", making allusions to The Shining all the more explicit. Immediately, the song distances the new album from its 2005 predecessor, Valende, its hyperactive racket displaced by a disquieting sense of calm: over a wheezing church-organ drone, Fasolo sighs out a ghostly, indecipherable choral melody, while periodic guitar plucks and floor-tom beats delineate the existence of a chorus. This hazy stasis is echoed on the album's closing track, "Come Closer", essentially, a slow-motion revision of Pink Floyd's "Astronomy Domine." But these tracks prove to be anomalies-- the dusk/dawn bookends to a very bizarre night that transpires in between.
Fasolo plays every instrument heard on The Midnight Room, and in the album's middle eight-song string, he sounds like he's trying to record all his parts at once: guitar chords are played on single strings in circular patterns, each string pluck punctuated by a broken tin-soldier drum beat. The songs all share a curious, clockwork nature that effectively enhances the strangeness of Fasolo's voice, which often makes you wonder if the singer is seven years old or 70. But if Fasolo's intent on The Midnight Room was to evoke the feeling of a mind slowly deteriorating, he's done almost too good a job-- over the course of the album, the spare notes and martial rhythms accrue the maddening effect of a water-torture drip. This fidgety restlessness seems set to explode on "It's In Her Eyes", when a hard snare hit triggers a loud, power-chord riff and a scream; alas, it's the final note of the song.
The blissed-out space-boy heard on Valende hasn't been completely lost in the void: Winsome turns like "Take My Hand" and "Electric Princess" suggest that Fasolo's fascination with Syd Barrett has little to do with the latter's acid-casualty legend and more to do with his plainspoken charms and innocent, romantic whimsy. But another pervasive influence appears to be Frank Zappa's Freak Out!, in the kazoo flourishes of "Mercury Blood" and the pervasive things-going-bump-in-the-night clatter, which hits a fever pitch in the cacophonous din of pounding pianos and typewriter bells that comprise "Granny's House". The Midnight Room is a masterful exercise in creating a peculiar and absorbing sense of mood and place. But, as befits an album born of extreme isolation, its painstaking, constricting song structures can also make The Midnight Room an unwelcoming place to be.
