When he assumed the name Jak Tomas in 2018, the artist formerly known as Joshua Kenneth Grierson signalled a reset of the folk-rock music he’d been recording and performing since his 2004 debut EmoKidJosh. Two years later, the first full-length Jak Tomas album, Of Love & Anxiety, is simultaneously a compelling manifestation of that intention - and a soundtrack to the current historical moment with its intertwining of the anxiety we are all feeling with the love we are all needing.

“I want the album to tell a story: a new story, with a different name,” says Tomas of the seven-track release – and album opener “Enemy” offers up the first evidence of this.

As the song gathers pace and heads towards the end of this tale of two people whose love is in a “terrible state”, it’s evident that the melodic instincts that have been the bedrock of Tomas’s musical output for 15 years are firmly present. What’s new is the musical terrain that is being mined to give flesh to the superlative songwriting that has always set Tomas apart. It’s not the easy-going beats that Tomas – an accomplished live DJ – turned to some years back, when seeking to locate his songs in more adventurous territory (on the likes of “The Body” or “Bad Fish” off 2018’s retrospective The Best of an Old Name). With Of Love & Anxiety the Cape Town-based artist first enters, and then totally inhabits, an enthralling mix of acoustic and electronic elements that never overshadow Tomas’s sonic material.

Perhaps the pinnacle of this new landscape is album closer “The Legalities of Romance” which manages, with its slow washes of sound, to be at once gossamer and weighted heavily with emotion. The song’s refrain - “You can’t unsay/What you’ve said/You can’t go back/You can’t undo/What you’ve done/You can’t go back on your word” – captures, with poetic awareness, the moment in relationships where words that are spoken change the course of love forever.

As much as Of Love & Anxiety exposes love’s dark side, there are also moments of clarity about the experience of loving and being loved through different phases of life. “O how I’ve been blessed …” intones Tomas in “Gone (are the words) - Yet Love Knew My Name” over the most slender pulsing beat and textural layers of sound. “I was just a kid/with a crush” has a simplicity and sweetness that is carried by some of Tomas’s most tender and affecting lyrics (”Kindness goes far/When you are an outsider).

But it’s also hard to escape the undercurrent of anxiety that’s never far away from Tomas’s material. “Dirty fragments/Of a thought/Made its way/Into my heart/Started questioning/If I’m the one (With the fault),” he sings on “Good Boy”, emphasising the point with subdued percussion and the doubling up of his vocals on the song’s lyrical centrepiece – “I was just a good boy/Caught in a row”.

“Of Love & Anxiety speaks about falling in and out of love and the ever-present anxiety danger in the 21st century,” says Tomas of the lyrical themes that drive this absorbing album forward.

Whether he intended it or not, releasing an album entirely of his own making (the music, arrangement, lyrics, recording, mixing and mastering are all his) echoes the solitariness brought about by the current pandemic. This is perhaps most visible on the album’s two instrumentals. “Episode Breeze” is a sonic meditation that uses soft layering to evoke the sensation you get when lying on your back, watching clouds, big and small, fast and slow-moving, passing overhead. “Hollis” is as contemplative - but it builds around sweeping organ-like synthesisers that evoke images of a spiritual gathering, far into the future.

One of the most striking aspects of Of Love & Anxiety is how little it depends on the urgent, visceral performing that has provided the fulcrum for Tomas’s songs until now.

As anyone who has seen him tackle favourites like “Dead Man’s House” or “Detangled” live can attest, Tomas has always ignited his world-class, country-inflected folk-rock songs with an unstinting passion that’s all-consuming. But, while he is exploring ways of performing its songs with a band, the scaled-back instrumentation and sensitively shorn production ensure Of Love & Anxiety is delivered with the conviction of a singular artist who has made it to the place where he was always heading.

- Diane Coetzer

For further information please contact:

Jak Tomas
frenchtoastinafrica@gmail.com
+27 78 423 4399