Jayne Dent’s intrepid explorations of folk song and abstract electronics as Me Lost Me have often produced extraordinary music but her fourth album, This Material Moment, is her most accomplished and inventive yet. Setting aside storytelling, Dent makes use of chance-based and automatic writing techniques to arrive at something vibrant and evocative. Such formal exercises can make for interesting if somewhat dry results but they can also open doors to the unconscious and when Dent noticed her feelings bleeding through into the songs she accepted it, ultimately calling this “the most emotionally raw album I’ve ever made”.
This emotional core provides a steadying weight. The songs never wander into directionless indulgence and you never doubt her. She resists the urge to overwork the lyrics or drag them into more familiar shapes. They do not run to orderly meter or rhyme schemes and much is obscure, glinting beneath the rapid stream of sense impressions and memory. The opening line asks us to “Consider this flow we’re feeling”. It’s an album you feel more than follow. Dent’s luminous voice, its melodies crowded by the narrow shapes of words, spreads its wings and lifts into the air, blurring them across one another.
This Material Moment may be Dent’s most personal record, but it does not find her alone. Although written and arranged solo, much of This Material Moment features a band, Faye MacCalman adding delicate clarinet with John Pope and Ewan Mackenzie bringing a live rhythm section for the first time. They widen the sound but are used sparingly, bringing an almost martial back beat to the bleak procession of ‘Compromise!’ and a full band rumble behind ‘Ancient Summer’ and the discordant electronics of ‘Take it on Board’. Elsewhere her vocal begins ‘Lasting, not to last’ clearly, slowly dissolving into its rich drone. On the brief, elegiac, ‘Vanishing Point’ she sings unaccompanied.
Some of the emotional beats feel clearer than others but I suspect that depends on the listener. If her process opened a channel for Dent, the album offers something similar for us. It is open but not as exposed as she might fear. On it’s sweetest, most song-shaped moment, ‘A Painting of the Wind’. she admits. “you know as well as I the way songwriters hide”. She meditates on how painting is “life-like but not real life” – a sentiment which echoes as “the most unreal reality” in the following song. Again stood before a painting, ‘Still Life’ begins with bells and pulsing electronics, hallucinatory and humble it holds us in sway, a sudden awareness of the charge of life in its most ordinary details. “Never thought I’d be moved by still life / But a pause is a gift I’d like”. An absolute highlight, it is also an oblique guide and, indeed, a rare gift.
