Jack Garratt: Love, Death and Dancing review – despair, recovery and reinvention

Assuming such things carry on as normal in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, in a few months’ time, denizens of the music industry will be asked to cast their votes for the BBC’s Sound of … poll and the 2021 Brits rising star award (formerly known as critics’ choice). For new artists, topping these polls is generally assumed to make success a foregone conclusion. But heaping accolades on any artist at the start of their career can have unpredictable effects: just ask Jack Garratt, who won both polls in 2016 – a feat, as it was customary to point out, that had previously been achieved by Adele, Sam Smith and Ellie Goulding, multi-platinum transatlantic success stories all.

Released in the accompanying publicity blaze, Garratt’s debut album, Phase, wasn’t bad – the Buckinghamshire-born songwriter could write bulletproof pop melodies – but he was audibly still working out who he wanted to be: you could hear both the looming influence of James Blake and that of the current crop of earnest acoustic pop singer-songwriters. But a debut album with potential wasn’t good enough in the overheated climate the awards had created. It sold well rather than spectacularly, a state of affairs that somehow meant Garratt’s name became a byword for commercial underachievement within 12 months: “He must have heard certain people talking about his album and saying that it was a failure,” Rag’n’Bone Man said, warily, when it was announced that he had won the 2017 critics’ choice award. “You sold 60,000 copies of your album, how can that be a failure?”

By then, Garratt had vanished from view. The intervening four years have apparently been spent trying to cope with the fallout from his tumultuous 12 months as the next big thing: something that, in Garratt’s telling, he was never comfortable about, but naively found himself swept along with. The lyrics of his recent single Time sounded like a mental note-to-self not to give up: “You’re overthinking, in a rut and terrified … but time is on your side.” Virtually the first words you hear on Love, Death and Dancing are: “I’m not the main event, won’t you take me as I am?” After that, there are a lot of references to mental health, medication, visits to the doctor: Get in My Way finds Garratt chewing himself to death over bad reviews and commercial expectations (“you need the boy with the arena eyes”) while Mara suggests he’s found some kind of peace through Buddhism or meditation.

It’s troubled stuff, but in the midst of all this turmoil, Garratt has clearly found time to strip away the more overbearing influences from his music. Instead of trying to distil a mass of currently modish styles into something resembling the flavour of the month, he has devised a take on modern pop idiosyncratic enough to call his own. Under the circumstances, Garratt could be forgiven for coming up with something abstruse and how-do-you-like-me-now? but his melodic instincts are fully intact. While Circles and Mend a Heart come equipped with wildly commercial choruses, sonically, Love, Death and Dancing frequently deals in rough-edged maximalism, where tape hiss coexists with stacked, Queen-esque vocal harmonies and abrasive synth tones. House beats and extravagantly glitching electronics – the intro of Old Enough keeps cutting out entirely, as if you’re streaming it via a shonky wi-fi connection – are overlaid with distorted glam guitars or disrupted by rhythmic shifts and sudden bursts of proggy riffing.

The effect is striking, paring disconsolate lyrics with fizzily exciting music: there’s something breathless about the number of ideas Better packs into four minutes, without losing its grip on its melody; Anyone starts out as a hazy sliver of Prince-y rock-soul decorated with birdsong, unexpectedly bursts into a high-drama chorus and undergoes an equally unexpected twist in time signature before reaching a chaotic, noisy finale. It’s not all perfect – presumably in search of an uplifting finale, the album overdoes the gospel-inspired inflections in its final tracks, which is precisely the kind of overfamiliar 2010’s pop trope that the rest goes out of its way to avoid – but there’s no mistaking a fresh sense of invention and originality about Love, Death and Dancing, a desire to rattle the sonic homogeneity of current pop.

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It might well work – Better would cause your head to turn if it cropped up on Radio 1 or amid a Hot Hits playlist – although you suspect vast commercial success probably isn’t the point this time around. For all its lyrical tales of trauma and disappointment, Love, Death and Dancing sounds like the work of a man who’s had the weight of expectation lifted from his shoulders and felt free to do what he wanted: a stark contrast to its predecessor. In that sense, if no other, the premature awards and their aftermath might be the best thing that could have happened to Jack Garratt.

• Love, Death and Dancing is released on 12 June.

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