Review Summary: Run its course, recognise it
When I was in my early 20's, I made the classic, cliché mistake of falling in love with my best friend's girlfriend. After about a year, I thought I'd almost gotten over it, I was in a good space, and I had not crossed any boundaries. Then, about two minutes before I'd have made peace with things, they broke up. What followed was one of the bleakest phases of my life. Fate put us together briefly, but I was far too immature to be in a relationship with this person, and the connection failed. I got stuck; I hurt people around me, and I hurt myself. Everything I processed, all the media, books and music, it all seemed to suggest it was noble to love this much. In retrospect, I can only look back on this period with shame. Ironically, it's through the help of my friend that I moved forward, but even then I don't think I really got over it until years later.
It is important to accept that relationships end, and new ones will be forged. Montell Fish, an artist more known for his contemporary Christian music, has released an album dealing with that type of break up which leaves you feeling as if you awake each morning coated in glass and glue. Nothing you do will remove the traces of it, and every time you move, you cut and grate and burn. The only thing that
seems to work is to dampen your thought processes, but by now it's fairly common knowledge that that path just leads to prolonged detachment and greater damage.
Jamie is almost a ghost story as much as it's a break up piece; on the opener it sounds like the music is happening in the past, stepping forward and falling away at the same time to accompany Fish's falsetto in the intimate midnight ambience of the present. As the album progresses, it also jumps around in time, with snatches of personal history often denoted by romantic acoustic backing. It's interesting when compared to the obvious reference point of Bon Iver's debut - a mythical, poetic work about suffering and healing in remote, snowy beauty. Both are acoustic and ethereal, but Fish eschews the heady lyricism. At the end of the title track, he plays a recording of himself just talking about whether it's healthy to love this much. There's no poetry to be had; in "And I'd go a thousand miles" Fish states "A thousand miles beyond but you're still in control". It's like the Proclaimers admitting defeat in a awful limbo of reversal and despair on Leith. Then there's weird passages of wishful thinking, like the hopeful reboot intro of "Enough for you". Once you realise the negative sentiment of the song, the slump that follows is predictably inevitable.
The obvious (and valid) criticism of this work is the repetitive vocal patterns - it plays like a big deconstructed song, just sprawling about a room filled with ashtrays, uneaten food and empty pill bottles. Many of the lines end the same way, keeping you down in cycles of despair and navel gazing - I liked the aesthetic of detached malaise but it could put off listeners who don't connect with the device. Fish uses the openings of each new track like a man raising his head weakly from the pillow. His straining falsetto reaches new levels of frailty on the penultimate, pathetic pleading of "Darling", atop churning, fuzz field guitars and sweating drums, a fitting crescendo of desperate smallness. My favourite aspect of this is that the album does end with Fish reconciling with his obsession, and importantly, he treats his inability to let go or embrace perspective as a form of arrogance. It's an valuable insight, and one I wish I'd had 20 years ago.
