JOEL SARAKULA
Soft Focus (Legere Recordings)
IT HAS TO BE SAID, because it’s true: this is some nice shit.
Not just nice, smooth and elegant, gliding down the line in silky seconds and velvety moments that suggest no sweat will be raised, even tempered and placid on the surface while slowly bubbling away underneath with intimations of lust, curiosity and stronger feelings that surely must burst through and mess things up one day. Though today is not that day.
Joel Sarakula, who dresses better than you or I do without looking like a peacock, is no stranger to music that is rhythmic and caressive and never really giving way to base notions, even when flesh meets flesh. An Australian with European sensibilities and American tastes, he is a man out of time. Or, given the renewed interest in his kind of music as Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary captures attention, a man with whom the times have caught up.
If last time we heard him, in 2023’s Island Time, the mood and setting and dress was beachside cabana – summer loose and a touch frisky in bodies still-sun-warmed – Soft Focus brings Sarakula back to his natural setting: off-centre lit urban, sharply cut but still elegantly casual, and mid-evening with prospects as well as a hint of danger.
There’s a nudge to dance at all times. Not anything as crass as a big thumping beat, mind you, but the shoulder-waggling, foot-tapping rhythm that finds you moving in your seat at first, then somehow sliding out of the booth on to the dancefloor as if it were all one extended move. (Which it would be if you were in satin on leather seats now that I think this through.) And like all good dance records, it stands outside a simple dichotomy of mechanical vs organic.
If the pianos and acoustics of Loved Up and Bird Of Paradise are touched by skin, just as often the synths are defiantly mechanical sounding, revelling in their quirks and modernity alongside an ability to fill the middle with wide, if not necessarily deep, sounds. They are set against guitars that come with a brushing of jazz and a coat of funk, drums which fool the ear with simplicity when they’re in fact tricky little beasts, and a general cloak of genteel warmth.
Elsewhere, our man isn’t afraid to throw to falsetto but even then his delivery is as relaxed as the oohs and aahs in Telephone Call; the glistening keys across the rollerblading-ready I’ll Get By Without You bring a low-key partner in the hand percussion (think first wave Sade) along for the ride; and the way the clavinet evokes some innervisions in Microdosing buys some space for the wah wah-ing LA guitar.
Be advised that you should come prepared for little traps, or maybe that should be catches, for newcomers to satin and lace, and I don’t even mean Authenticity, which isn’t a sly bit of undermining – Sarakula isn’t here for cheap irony points – but the silkiest bit of Al Jarreau-ish life mentoring.
Midnight Movie may be alarming for some who haven’t quite forgiven themselves for once liking Spandau Ballet circa True, though Sarakula is a much better lyricist than Gary Kemp so you can rest easy on that front. It forsakes smart casual for something smoother, suited and wide shouldered, and it almost croons. And of course, the characters are not always reputable – after all, it is nighttime and rules and morals weaken out of sunlight, even for the best among us.
Bitcoin Bro’s protagonist is familiar to anyone who scans the scam pages, aka the business section of the newspapers, and the titular mover and shaker of King Of Spain should not ever be trusted, especially if he’s smiling. Meanwhile you may wonder if the woman on the other end of Telephone Call has good intentions, or if the psychedelic adventurer of Microdosing is too high on his own supply to be believed in his love the world-ness.
But maybe none of that matters when you’re deep in the Prince circa 1978 creaminess-meets-slinkiness of Confident Man – an opening track that makes it very clear where we’re heading for the next 40-odd minutes – and maybe that is exactly how it should be.
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