Jinja SafariJinja Safari's new self-titled album has a sound to it like something they've been trying to get out of their bones for years. Not that their past output has been illegitimate in any way, but it's never before been this consistent; it's always been a collection of esteemed highs, and the natural troughs in-between. More than anything else, Jinja Safari is the record marking the band's surrender to a series of freewheeling, sublimely enduring melodies.
Opening track Apple has the kind of chorus you'll dream about coming back to all day. The percussion therein and indeed all over the record is deceptively complex; always a bony storm of colour and pitch, rickety sounds dancing together in a jungle of happy noise. Where it most counts, too, the band feel bigger than they ever have before. Toothless Grin is laced with gorgeously intertwining pan-flute, bubbly harmonies, and endlessly rushy keys. Like everything on this record, it at once feels effortlessly loose and yet so perfectly, meticulously constructed.
Further on, Harrison grows hot out of a sitar-stung heathaze; a swell of shimmying, shimmering vocals, and an oily guitar that spills and curls deliciously over the track. So casually does the band shift in and out of signatures, you realise, as Harrison turns in its blushing, romantic outro. “Let's take one last walk/I don't want this last kiss goodbye,” Azon sings, never before this clear in the mix, nor so direct in subject and sentiment.
A great love story told in deep pink-cloud synths, Afropop rhythms, and rainbow harmonies, Jinja Safari is a shining, scorching, bursting album that has so much to give it can barely contain itself.
