A while back KatCigarette, reviewing one of Julia Jacklin’s singles warned you in these (web)pages what you could potentially expect from her album “Don’t Let The Kids Win”.Now that the album has ben around a few months, you can truly appreciate Julia’s talent and her tongue in cheek title. She is basically a kid (in heart, definitely). She won.
Julia got into music in her native Australia by listening to Britney Spears and Avril Lavigne. Maybe that has something to do with the fact of growing up in the Blue Mountains. But, if the mentioned two can inspire somebody to come up with music that Julia did on her debut album, more power to them too.
Can hardly feel any traces of Spears or Lavigne here, though. Jacklin cites Fiona Apple and Anna Calvi as her latter inspirations. Myself, I get a sense of such Australian (and New Zealand ) greats like The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, and The Chills. When backed by a band, like on the initial three tunes of this album, Jacklin comes up to that “perfect ramshackle” sound all the mentioned bands could come up with whenever they wanted to.
When it is just Julia and the acoustic guitar or minimal backing (“Elizabeth”), it is her voice that truly shines. In some respects, it brings to mind, Samantha Crain, another great singer/songwriter that like Jacklin, definitely deserves more recognition.
It is easy to say which Julia Jacklin I prefer. Both of them. Both concepts gel perfectly, and the album sounds like a unified whole. Jacklin is in her mid-Twenties and if she keeps coming up with stuff like this, we can expect great stuff from her.
