Julia Jacklin: Pre Pleasure review – more disarming introspection

Julia Jacklin is a confessional singer-songwriter, with all the trouble that brings: the need to produce pain on schedule; the compromised boundaries. But this wry, canny Australian shrugs at these tropes and keeps mining her life for discomfort on her assured third album, Pre Pleasure. It’s a record about the impossibility of communication, and never quite solving your problems. I Was Neon catalogues all the ways Jacklin has tried to present “correctly” – a deceptively easygoing indie rock tune whose wordless exclamations convey as much as her well-chosen words and even tone.

Jacklin’s ability to stop you in your tracks has not waned. “Go put ice in your mouth, let them slap you about,” she sings, cataloguing sex advice she has absorbed since her early teens on Ignore Tenderness. Mid-album, Less of a Stranger is a skewering dose of bittersweetness about the distance between Jacklin and her mother. By contrast, she can also conjure picture-perfect third-person vignettes. Moviegoer “opens with a wide shot”, and ponders how success is elusive: “20 million dollars, still nobody understands you,” sings Jacklin, sweetly.

Written on keyboards rather than guitar, Pre Pleasure was recorded in Montreal with Marcus Paquin of the Weather Station; you can hear the uptick in arrangement and production in the painterly thrum of the instruments.