Jay Som Crafts Inventive and Textured Dream Pop on ‘Anak Ko’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

“can’t wait to quit music and never talk to anyone ever again also i wanna live on a damn farm” – Jay Som

Anak Ko, the second proper album from Melina Duterte’s expansive dream pop project Jay Som, out now on Polyvinyl, followed the runaway success of Everybody Works, which seemed to require of Duterte a reevaluation and ultimately a rejection of a city, a particular daily grind, and a socially acceptable coping mechanism.

Coping isn’t only required during hard times, and vices can also be especially alluring after sudden success. After recording and touring on Everybody Works, Duterte relocated from her native Bay Area to L.A., and in an arguably bigger change, she chose to transition to sobriety before recording the follow-up album Anak Ko.

“How do you find peace / With a drink in your hand?” – Get Well

Duterte found herself feeling frustrated about failing to perfectly navigate this new territory — making huge changes also means making mistakes — and found eventual acceptance through self-kindness, positivity, and centeredness.

She also surrounded herself with supportive people in her personal life as well as on the recording. In contrast to Everybody Works — in which her hands were notably and impressively in every aspect of the release — with Anak Ko, now that she’s proven she doesn’t have to, she brings in some friends.

“(It’s only change) / I changed my mind / Just takes some time / I wanna change / I wanna change” – Devotion

Lead single “Superbike” lands like a dream pop “Pink Houses.” Its Americana undercurrent almost jangles, yet it trades sing-along melodies for legato moods, with feathered textures molting across an array of verses. The superbike doesn’t truly emerge until the vocals hit, and then it feels like 85 degrees of summer sunlight are bathing its gleaming surfaces with a powerful protagonist harnessing its conferred majesty, highly romanticized and dripping with whimsy yet not untroubled.

In many of Jay Som’s lyrics, as on “Superbike,” you can tell Duterte is going through something and feeling some type of way, often involving another person, but you’re never quite sure what that someone means to Duterte or exactly what the problem is, as her lyrics mostly tend toward nebulous opacity.

Anak Ko’s second single, “Nighttime Drive”, finds Duterte confronting another tour leg, and contains the most specific imagery of the album: “Been watching hours pass / Inside cars with no glass / Constructing dreams of / Shoplifting at the Whole Foods.” Sonically, it could be a midsummer day adrift on a lake or a beachy chillout at sunset as easily as a nighttime drive. Guitars are tasteful and drums are smooth and simple with nearly whispered over-easy soprano vocals. Relaxed strings sloppily guide the track into the garage at the end of the night.

Third single “Tenderness” is a relatable cut focusing on “the curse of social media and how it complicates relationships…scrolling on your phone and seeing a person and…you can’t escape it.” Sparse, sexy and remote, the intro is hazy in the distance like it might be a mirage, only to snap into near-field focus after an effortless drum fill. With an R&B groove that hints at funk and a slinking bassline, the mature and fully-formed “Tenderness” is the best track on the album.

The title track is full of textures. A manipulated guitar weaves a spooky wash of tones around silken vocals, followed by ominous ascending bass notes before building layers of sonic suggestions — maybe a swirling helicopter, male voices cutting through walkie talkie static, shattering glass — while never actually including those sounds, like a Foley artist making and breaking plans with a mime. “Anak Ko” feels like 3 and a half minutes of explorations: poking through underbrush, digging up treasures, feeling out options.

“If You Want It” owns its confident beat, slickly pivoting under distant smoothly cooing vocals. Duterte’s reverberant washed out voice is just one more layer in this track of textures folding back on themselves, its sweet layers climbing like a tiered wedding cake.

“Peace Out” plays with ghostly vocals and vacantly strummed distorted guitars. The churning repetition sparks a vibe; you can’t be sure if it’s wistful and nostalgic for yesterday or for an imagined hoped-for future. Either way, it feels like goodbye.

With Anak Ko, Duterte continues to release high quality inventive textured dream pop, and more importantly seems to have found what she was looking for: a change of scenery and a change of personal habits — free from alcohol and buffeted by a community of friends and collaborators with whom to enjoy her newfound success, plus a healthy dose of self-care and positivity, and forgiveness for the mistakes inevitably made when we intentionally choose to take an alternate path.

Photo credit: Lindsey Byrnes

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