The eponymous lyric from Jackie West’s debut album has been running through her head throughout most of her life: “Only the wind can pull my body/close to the mystery.” Before it found a home in her hazy, Julee-Cruise-like ballad Ethereal Nature the line functioned as a mantra for the Brooklyn singer-songwriter. It seemed to point her towards inspiration and clarity just out of reach. The breathtaking Close to the Mystery (out May 10 via Ruination Record Co.) threads together many moments of searching and reaching out—pulled from a variety of relationships and settings, articulated through a range of musical points. Its masterful baroque-pop songs form abstract scenes in a larger story about a self and worldview taking shape; in each, West assesses different, transient versions of herself, making revisions and absorbing the changes into a fuller, more finite draft. 
Today –after having her on our TRISTE© MIXTAPE feature– we have the great honour to host the exclusive premiere of her debut album!
Scroll on down below to listen to Close To The Mystery and don’t forget to click on through to the band’s Bandcamp page to pre-order it before it releases on May 10th. Do yourself a favor and don’t sleep on this one; it’s going to be one of the best album of the year.

Invitingly familiar yet unidentifiable, Jackie West’s songs are characterized by the unusual, elliptical chord progressions in her deftly sculpted melodies— reminiscent of songwriters like Sibylle Baier and Jessica Pratt, and music that tends towards the elemental, featuring hypnotic, chugging guitar accompaniments recalling the Velvet Underground or Arthur Russell’s cello accompaniments.

West’s songs follow her protagonist across city blocks, into and out of different rented rooms, and down farflung highways that form backdrops for liminal moments in her life. They furnish contrasting scenes influenced by the past decade of West’s life, well-shuffled out of order and context. The otherworldly art song that opens the record, End of the World, finds its narrator living alone in someone else’s apartment in the emotionally shut-down aftermath of a relationship, looking out the window at a shut-down world. Over shimmering finger-picked guitar, orchestral swells—samples of bits of a string arrangement from a scrapped recording of the song—bubble up and fade like foiled promises of catharsis.

Close to the Mystery spools outward from there, in many exciting and contrasting directions. Its shadowy, varied stories all point back to the same hypothesis: that personal peace and fortitude can only come from within. West’s linearly unfolding songforms mimic the way her narrators work through their dilemmas in real time. In the misty waltz Differences she marvels at the disparity between her way of moving through and thinking about the world and her ex-partner’s. The darkly funny, Velvets-like rocker Ruins explores the sensation of being unable to look into the eyes of a lover, after sensing her inability to fully connect with them. The song’s circular form feels like—as West puts it—“a never-ending spiral”, evoking the futile feeling of trying to find common ground with a self-interested and manipulative person. 

Even when West feels alone with her thoughts, there are people right next to her—if not lovers, then friends she is observing with curiosity and reaching to emphasize with (Ethereal Nature). She sometimes assumes a journalistic role: on Have the Time she daydreams about a fleeting interaction on a road trip through Marfa, Texas, creating a sad half-fiction around a charismatic stranger’s lonely lifestyle: “I read the tattoo on your arm/ ‘All that I have loved, I’ve loved alone’/Knowing for certain, by morning, she’d be gone.” A note of haunted Americana creeps into the music, in the vein of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood’s spaghetti-western pop operas. Sometimes, West is a fly on the wall in much broader contexts: In the neo-soul-inflected Dreamscape she feels the proximity of millions of people rather than one. As a new participant in New York City life, she feels both invisible and—as she describes it—“intoxicated by” the possibility of connection: “So far while near/You live on edge of experience/Dreams cross a cityscape/You wait.”

But even when she sings about being lost—whether in someone else or in the world—West never sounds less than certain of her capacity to navigate the situation. The lyrics evidence her sharp intuition and natural empathy, sung in a voice that seems to be able to phrase any thought indelibly. It is a challenge to sound self-assured and fully formed as an artist while remaining curious and adaptive. In both form and content, following her zigzagging adventures leads us toward our own personal revelations.  The alluring contrasts in her writing and commanding delivery make us want to return to Close to the Mystery to dig for fresh insights to guide our own journeys.

Close To The Mystery will be out May 10th via Ruination Recording Co.. Click HERE for more information on Jackie West.