It's likely Jam City's Classical Curves informed how some of your favorite producers work. The Night Slugs/Fade To Mind member's last album was cavernous, sterile, and compartmentalized. In many ways, it was a product of the capitalist system's insurmountable matrix of control over everyday life, even the process of making music. It occupied an extreme on the spectrum of a trend that spread throughout avant-garde dance music over the course of the last three years. Jam City, alongside Kingdom, Bok Bok and Girl Unit, brought a similar perspective to their production on Kelela's Cut 4 Me mixtape. The vacuous, metallic tracks laid under Kelela's raw, emotive vocals helped make that tape one of the best releases of 2013.
Dream A Garden is Jam City, AKA Jack Latham's follow up album. It couldn't be more different. Part pop, part post-punk, the album's influences range from hip-hop and grime to country and gothic. To call it a departure would miss the point. It is an inverse reaction to that same machine Classical Curves so successfully emulated. For Jam City, Dream A Garden is the breathing, feeling musician's response. At face value, it's a DIY pop album laced with vocals and inventive instrumental performances. When considered together with Classical Curves, it is a radical statement: a refusal to submit to the seemingly totalizing clutches of the modern world.
The album bio closes with the below:
They want us to be sad,
They want us to be selfish,
They want us to be unhappy,
1.
Listen to Jam City's "Today," below. Dream a Garden is due out 3/23 via Night Slugs.
