I Find It Weird: A Brief Review Of The New Album From Jolan Lewis (Temple Songs, The Pink Teens, The Foetals)

You know how many new groups get pitched to this site where I tell the PR person, "This sounds like Temple Songs!" "Oh, you mean Temples?" "NO! I mean, Temple Songs, the Manchester band! Members ended up in The Pink Teens, and The Foetals." And then usually I send them a bunch of links to show what they've been missing.

Jolan Lewis (Temple Songs, The Pink Teens, The Foetals) has been busy with BC Camplight of late but he's back with a new album. I think this is the full-length offering since this one during the COVID shutdown. J.L. Opts Out, out now via Bandcamp, is a sort of Temple Songs reunion since it's got Andrew Richardson on it too. And it's got that same kind of wonderful pop sense about it that the first Temple Songs releases had more than a decade ago.

While I thought that the tunes of Temple Songs were wildly catchy, there was something delightfully skewed about them. The best felt like a mash-up of styles sometimes, and so I guess they never reached as wide an audience as they probably should have. For relative newcomers to this stuff, J.L. Opts Out is fairly melodic and almost straightforward. And while there's a number here called "I Find It Weird", this material, while iconoclastic, isn't really that weird at all (unless you count a wicked slide guitar as weird). The breathy "Meet Me at the Midnight Bowl" could be mistaken for a lost yacht rock gem, for instance, and "Absolutely" is an absolutely gorgeous slice of bedroom pop. Jolan Lewis has not, it seems lost his touch at all despite time away. On selections like "Silver", there's a modest energy in the hook which recalls the Pink Teens releases, while the elegantly pitched "We Can't Be Friends" is a sublime bit of work.

This is a less noisy record than some in the Jolan Lewis library, but it's no less a great one. What's here serves the melody, or the central idea of the tune, and each number achieves a kind of lilting, simple perfection that places this brand of pop entirely in its own special space. While DIY in a sense, this is hardly lo-fi given the ambitions here.

And, as before, Jolan Lewis can write stuff that lingers in the ear, and makes you feel like you're hearing something magical that sounds like something else magical you heard a long time ago and are now just remembering again. It's a wonderful quality for a record to have. Very highly recommended.

J.L. Opts Out by Jolan Lewis is out now via Bandcamp.

[Photo: Bandcamp]