Feels Like Home
by JessB
Local rapper Jess Bourke’s seven-song releases Bloom (2018) and New Views (2019) came close to being albums, but Feels Like Home is considered her debut. Her impressive career began seven years ago with her bristling, assertive, P Money-produced single Soul Free, on which she announced, “It’s a new chapter … the game in need of new rappers.”
Steadily building her reputation internationally and locally since, the statuesque performer (a former netball player with Northern Mystics and Central Pulse) has toured with Lady6, Six60 and Fat Freddy’s Drop, opened for Stormzy, played major festivals at home and abroad, done fashion shoots and released singles featuring Yoko-Zuna, Melodownz, Paige, dancehall star Rubi Du, Raiza Biza and others.
She has featured on songs by Stan Walker, The Adults (with Estére) and SWIDT. JessB has drawn comparisons with Missy Elliott for her righteous lyrics and feminist confidence: the kick-off song here is the assertive Power with kindred spirits Sister Nancy and Sampa the Great opening with, “That’s power in my veins let it show, tap into the source … feeling like a boss, let it move, let it grow.”
Although half of this album’s 12 tracks have been previously released, collecting them with new material shows the scope of her singular, signature sound.
She ranges effortlessly through global music influences and from witty dancehall (Ring Ring with Sydney-based Gold Fang and a sly Beyoncé reference: “If you like it, better put a ringtone on it, you can call my phone any time you wanna”) to being flush with romantic love on the steamy rhythm and lyrics of Hold Me Down.
Commando has a woozy stoner undercurrent, Waiting Patiently is a soul ballad at heart and the addictive Come Find Me (“I’m just finding myself, don’t mind me”) is snappy rap-pop.
And when JessB engages with a steely gaze (“Every thing I say … that’s me, that’s real” on Commando) you don’t doubt she was born for this.
My Light, My Destroyer
by Cassandra Jenkins
Brooklyn-based Jenkins’ previous album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature was skilfully arranged, dreamy art-folk which – mostly in subtext – dealt with accepting the 2019 suicide of David Berman (Silver Jews), whose band Purple Mountains she’d just joined in advance of a tour.
That uncommonly moving record meant trepidation for this follow-up which, happily, is its equal – but different – counterpart. Here she moves deeper within where, like Nick Cave, the mundane world co-exists with an interior reality (“I got the job at the flower shop, I sweep the floors but I’m talking to you” on the ethereal Delphinium Blue) and pop permits psychoanalysis (self-examination on Petco).
There are abrasive guitars (conjuring a whirling wind on the folk-rock of Aurora, IL), loose jazzy saxophones (akin to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks on Devotion), strings (Omakase), post-Velvet Underground drone-pop (Clams Casino) alongside spoken word and gorgeously 2am ambient lassitude (Tape and Tissue).
Jenkins is among many innovative women – Georgia Lines, St. Vincent, Weyes Blood and others – pushing the parameters of contemporary music to redefine poetic art-pop for adults. l
These albums are available digitally and on vinyl.
