EP REVIEW: Iknowyouknowiknow — Jamie Lenman
JAMIE LENMAN is a prime example of reinventing yourself as a musician when going at it solo. The former REUBEN frontman has been a solo artist for some time now, releasing five albums including his fifth and most recent effort The Atheist which came out just last year. Moving further away from anything suggestively rock orientated, Lenman has learnt to lean on folk tendencies in his new EP Iknowyouknowiknow. Other than it being a pain to type out or read, it’s a damn pleasure to listen to.
Iknowyouknowiknow is made up of leftovers and spare parts from the 2022 album The Atheist but by no means are the tracks anything short of expertly crafted woodwork. Apart from the brief brush with any sort of rock sounds featured in opening track Words Of Love, things get real folky. Before that though, the opening track is one doused in a romantic pain and betrayal, feeling like a real knife in the heart. Lenman’s vocals are composed but still there are touches of bitterness and pain within his emotions.
Soon after, the folk kicks in with an honest acoustic guitar, and Lenman’s soul is on his strings in Crazy Horse – the highlight being the cathartic chorus and its energetic drums that give this track its well needed punch. Run Right Home fits the gap for slow ballad on the EP, circling on the nostalgia of home — a sentiment which is plenty wholesome — which nurtures the feeling of welling up. Almost like grief. Any track that is this melancholic and slow can make the listener feel weak — not at the knees — or helpless, with no control over where they’re headed.
A welcome lesson in humility comes in the form of I Done Things I Ain’t Proud Of, a list of things that Lenman feels shame about. In this confessional he lists “I took my mother’s money and she don’t know where it went / I wrote some awful letters I never should have sent / Cursed a man until I couldn’t look him in the eye / Said the words I love you when I knew them for a lie”. It’s common for artists to use their music for some sort of catharsis but what’s really admirable here is the candour that Lenman expresses.
Closing with an acoustic version of This Town Will Never Let Us Go, a track which contradicts Run Right Home, it calls back to the time of when these tracks first came to conception, oding itself to The Atheist. Soft and rough in all the right places, it climaxes gradually for Lenman to release all the air from his lungs and dispel negative energy as he yells “This town will never let us go”. Finally he untethers himself physically and metaphorically for a beautiful closure of the EP.
Rating: 7/10
Iknowyouknowiknow is out now via Big Scary Monsters.
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