The Daily Spin, July 7
Jacob Collier | Djesse Vol. 1
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: Djesse Vol. 1 (2018)
Artist: Jacob Collier
Link:
The first in a quartet, Djesse Vol. 1 is prodigy Jacob Collier’s second full-length effort, and for all his prowess, it’s also deeply clear that is, at heart, the sort of flawed construction that can only come from an overabundance of talent and the rickety understanding that comes with figuring out how to apply it.
When it’s good, it’s absolutely stunning, a mishmash of genres that span from rock to electronica to indie to hip-hop to jazz to funk to orchestral compositions, sometimes all of the above at once and more, swaying and driving with the bountiful energy of youth and the excitement of a new day. ‘With The Love In My Heart’ is, I think, the best example of this, the cleanest cut on an album that tends to muddle itself in trying to find answers, a song that fuses everything into one cohesive story, building and receding as the tide does each note, before dropping into a very forward-funk drop, exploding into an insane blast of sound before cutting it all back to amble on home.
The problem is that, too frequently, the album insists upon itself - each track has to be so grandiose, so overbearing, to the point that at times they feel like slogs to get through. ‘Once You’, a nine-minute adventure, very much falls into this pit, as does ‘Home Is’, the album’s opener.
At times, the album feels more like an opportunity to showcase features than it does an opportunity to demonstrate the musical prowess that Collier has, which is deeply frustrating - listening to Collier break down his music shows just how wildly intelligent this guy is, and when so many of the tracks instead feel like opportunities for the Metropole Orkest to swing their weight around or for Voces8 or Take 6 to do their thing, it diminishes the arrangements and the behind-the-scenes work that helped me fall in love with the album originally.
Bombastic to a fault, it’s undeniably an immense sophomore effort, the sort of album that drives hooks in and keeps me coming back to his future work (which, don’t worry, we’ll get to those) - glimpses of that addicting prodigy at the heart of this record.
Rating: 8.5/10
Best Tracks: With The Love In My Heart; All Night Long
Worst Tracks: Ocean Wide, Canyon Deep; Home Is