The second single pulled from Jamie T’s new album, Carry on the Grudge, was the rollicking and relentlessly upbeat “Zombie.” It’s almost unbearably catchy – four minutes of glossy, low-key punk – but it’s not representative of the rest of the album, an album that took five years and hundreds of drafts of songs to come to fruition. Out of the 12 songs on Carry on the Grudge, only four of them – “Zombie,” “Trouble,” “Rabbit Hole,” and “Peter” – are uptempo. The other songs are moody, mellow, reflective numbers.
Indeed, Carry on the Grudge is a showcase for the enormously successful evolution Jamie has undergone over three albums. His debut, Panic Prevention (2007), was purposefully scrappy, full of South London-accented dialogue (“Fuckin’ cunts doing wheelies on bikes mate, I just wanna fuckin’ run ‘em ova”), twanging guitar strings, and rapid-fire raps. There’s humor, too: the very first noise on Panic Prevention is Jamie screaming “Fucking croissants!”, God knows why. The album was an immediate classic – Jamie, like peer Alex Turner, had the songwriting gift of making his own teenage years reflective of the teenage years of working class British youth: he rapped about his mates taking the piss, being a lightweight, his lack of direction, cigarettes, getting into scraps at pubs.
His sophomore effort, Kings & Queens (2009), was smoother, more produced. The dialogue at the end of songs was gone, but it had the same lyrical content, the same effortless alliteration and assonance (“Well the dream woulda been that the boys got clean”), and the same South London accent. The edge of Panic Prevention was lost somewhere in the studio, but there was a new cohesiveness in its place – the raps flowed, rather than being spat. The one major departure from Panic Prevention was the gorgeous “Emily’s Heart,” a tender acoustic ballad that saw Jamie singing all the way through.
“Emily’s Heart” is the bridge back to Carry on the Grudge. It’s of similar style to the eight slower numbers, “Mary Lee” being the closest match, but it’s easy to see where the music of “Zombie” came from – the melancholy is still there, hidden under cymbals and driving guitarwork. It is clear, then, where the melodic sounds of Carry on the Grudge originated; the progression of his music through the years is easy to track. There’s the sad strain of songs (Panic Prevention’s “So Lonely Was the Ballad,” to “Emily’s Heart,” to Carry on the Grudge-highlight “They Told Me It Rained”); aggressive songs (“Pacemaker” to “British Intelligence” to “Peter”), and regretful, nostalgic trips (“Sheila,” “Sticks ‘n’ Stones,” “Don’t You Find”). It’s an unbelievably intelligent and thoughtful way to build a career as an artist: a gradual musical evolution grounded in the same themes that started it all. The rap rock ofPanic Prevention was shockingly fresh; to have carried on in the same vein would have diminished its originality.
At the same time, the only real weakness of Carry on the Grudge is its lyrics. Jamie comes from a school of British songwriting that dates back to John Cooper Clarke, manifests itself in Morrissey, and runs through Jarvis Cocker in the 90s before re-emerging in the early 2000s with Jamie and Alex Turner. Their lyrical strength, as Jarvis recently expressed in an interview with Pitchfork, stems from their specificity – the effect of speaking personally is to produce a feeling that everyone knows. This is exactly what Jamie did in Panic Prevention. Unlike contemporary lyricists such as Pete Doherty, Jamie refused to shroud his message in metaphors: his poetry referenced the immediate world around him, and he mined from everything and everyone.
The lyrics in Carry on the Grudge tend towards vagueness. The chorus of “Rabbit Hole” references Alice in Wonderland; “Don’t you find/some of the time/there is always someone on your mind/that shouldn’t be at all” is the humdrum chorus of “Don’t You Find.” It seems that Jamie’s maturation – a five year hiatus is a long time – cost him the lyrical bite of his youth. He has flashes (from “Rabbit Hole”: “Who noticed the problems in Jennifer Bennett’s head?/She’s not the same person I grew up with, she’s not the same person that I left”), but nothing close to some of the sucker punches on Kings & Queens or Panic Prevention (“How’s Danny doin’, hear he’s high flyin an’ that/Stock broker in the city with a lady and a baby/And Fee, is she free from the demons she had?/Was it two months clean, routine to relapse?”).
The reason for the lack of specificity, I suspect, is because Carry on the Grudge is a more personal and emotionally intimate record than the first two. Whereas Panic Prevention and Kings & Queens were more stories from Jamie’s environment, Carry on the Grudge is all about Jamie’s own feelings. There are more “I’s”, and less characters – the titles of “Mary Lee” and “Peter” feel more like sly references to his oeuvre than “Sheila”-esque character studies (in “Mary Lee,” he even mentions New Bond Street, the shop from “368” off Kings & Queens). In effect, the lyrics ofCarry on the Grudge are less of a flaw than a sacrifice – it’s incredibly hard to write frankly and without cliché about one’s emotions. For Jamie to have applied the same observational writing approach to Carry on the Grudgewould have been too much to ask; so he made the choice to move away from writing about the South London experience and towards introspection and personal rumination.
Overall, Carry on the Grudge works. Jamie has always had a talent for manipulating the music to emphasize the lyrics, so the sentimentality of the words is lessened and the emotion behind them is heightened. And by moving in a different musical direction, Jamie saves Panic Prevention and Kings & Queens from retro-criticism of boringness. Let’s hope that album four is also another step in a different direction.
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