It’s been eight years since the last Jape album was released, but Richie Egan hasn’t been sitting around twiddling his thumbs and fretting about the end of the world.
Well, not exactly. There has always been an introspection and inquisitiveness to the Dublin musician’s output, but it seems as though his senses have been both heightened and honed on his sixth record.
Based between Dublin and Malmo, Sweden, Egan has been busy in recent years working as a composer for children’s animated shows on Nickelodeon and Prime Video. It’s a far cry from his days with instrumentalists The Redneck Manifesto and early Jape albums such as Cosmosphere and The Monkeys in the Zoo Have More Fun Than Me.
Still, it’s clear after just a few listens that Egan’s motley skill set has culminated in what is undoubtedly his most cohesive and well-rounded album to date.
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Influenced by 1970s artists including Robert Wyatt, Paul McCartney, John Cale and Judee Sill, the odder sounds of that decade are distilled into songs including album highlight The Hilbert Hotel, a charmingly offbeat creation built around piano and a wonky guitar riff, or the enjoyably quirky plod of Lashing Through the Minutes. The family-oriented In Our Home positively emanates McCartney, while the idiosyncratic electropop of Delete the Timeline recalls a band like Scritti Politti.
Elsewhere, songs like the dreamy ramble of Tomorrow and What a Day – which sweetly captures a sense of contentment with lines like “I escape my mind when I am out with you” – are songs that could only have come from Egan’s wheelhouse, a blend of homespun charm with gently progressive electronic pop and a sprinkling of reflection.
It is often the intricate details of these songs that augment them. Recorded in Egan’s own RARN Studio over the course of three years, they are tracks that have clearly been fine-tuned without being overworked.
Lead single and album opener Heal These Wounds treads a fine line between upbeat and dynamic, while the title track is one of the more sombre songs here, the flutter of guitar set against a soft clatter and multi-tracked vocals that make for a hymnal offering.
Egan ends the album with a brazen parting shot – F**k the Church, as its title suggests, is a piano-led protest song with shimmering, woozy effects and lines such as “The church as a concept is publicly good / with private depravity under the hood” and references to “projecting shame” that is all too brief.
After six albums and two decades, the Dubliner has hit upon a winning formula: first charm them, then surprise them, but always leave them wanting more.
