Away

Away marks Jo Passed's sophomore LP, but leaving it at that perhaps commits the injustice of suggesting Jo Hirabayashi (平林) is somehow new to the game. That's far from the case: the Vancouver-born, Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist and producer holds a long and storied recording resume, beginning as far back as the late-2000s with the post-hardcore outfit SSRIs (later Sprïng) and culminating with the 2018 debut of Jo Passed on Their Prime.As such, this album is not just the second offering of Hirabayashi's solo discography, but also the homecoming of a veteran musician after an eight-year hiatus; sporting a new label, a new band, a new city — and, seemingly, a new lease on life.Established fans of Jo Passed will be happy to find that Away lives up to its development time, being something both comfortably familiar and appropriately matured. All of the acknowledged Jo Passed staples are here — namely, airy, diaphanous vocals hovering over more-than-competent math rock-adjacent arrangements. Yet, what's most interesting about this record is what has changed about the JP formula.While Their Prime dealt in duelling guitar parts on the more serrated side of 21st century post-punk (see heralded Calgary export Women), Away tones down the noise and shrieking triads in favour of a more grounded and decidedly song-forward methodology. The album's partially-acoustic finale, "Mother Night," is a stand-out in this sense: here, Hirabayashi is easily at his most Eliott Smith, with the singer's doubled vocal inching into that sliver-sized middle ground between saccharine and melancholic.Though not without its moments of focused catharsis, Away turns out to be Jo Passed's most mellow project to date. If you were a Sprïng mosh pit partaker (perhaps at Thor's Palace) hoping for your fix of seizure-inducing post-prog, this album may leave you eating a little lean. However, listeners seeking something from a more tender part of the spindly indie rock corpus should be pleasantly surprised by this new, decidedly pop-oriented approach.