A Soft and Gatherable Star

The Mississipian singer-songwriter Jhelisa once described the Bristolian trip hop of Portishead and Tricky as a particularly British “version of modern blues, [with] a depth and darkness, something old and pagan that I heard in Thom Yorke and shoegaze, a different kind of ancient expression of feeling blue, of being dark”. It’s exactly this kind of deeper-than-melancholy feeling that the trio Jabu and their wider Young Echo collective – also from Bristol – tap into. On this, their fourth album proper, you can hear strung out echoes of postpunk, goth, industrial, dub, even grime, but way more than that it feels like an upwelling from the ancient foundations of the city.