"Eden has traditionally been portrayed as a magical garden with a gal, a guy, a snake, and an apple ruining all life for eternity for everyone. But what if it was actually a rural farm on the border of England and Wales, with sheep and hens and teenagers getting rat-drunk on Baileys, listening to Kanye on a hill, and singing a song called "Dubstep in My Trousers,""
"This is paradise as Joscelin Dent-Pooley conjures it on his second album as Jerskin Fendrix, more or less as he experienced it growing up in remote Shropshire in the late 2000s. Never mind his life today as an Oscar-nominated composer who scored Yorgos Lanthimos' last three films and got Emma Stone to star in one of his latest videos; he still sings about these Elysian scenes of bumpkin teen life with such earnest reverence,"
Jerskin Fendrix's second album recreates a rural Eden of late-2000s Shropshire, full of sheep, hens, teen parties, ironic humor, and pastoral balladry. The record pairs pristine chamber arrangements and cuckoo-clock vocal flourishes with maximalist, theatrical delirium, using ridiculousness and melodrama to expose underlying rot and the terror of loss. Fendrix sings in a cavernous, Hades-like voice that both elevates and humanizes these scenes while drawing on his background as an Oscar-nominated composer. The album was written in the aftermath of a close childhood friend's suicide, and the music balances reverent nostalgia with unsettling hints of mortality.
Read at Pitchfork
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