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The role of Camelot on Jennifer Castle’s seventh album goes slightly beyond an extended metaphor. It is an entire structure, a porous one that allows everything to permeate its skin, and in doing so, it becomes a kind of magical framework capable of supporting a wide range of ideas. Castle’s primary theme is middle age and the changes that occur in individuals at certain periods in their lives. These changes create tensions, and Camelot is the space where these tensions get to play out against each other: a kind of jousting match with religion and mystic thought on one side and secular, pragmatic humanism on the other. That’s not to say that these songs couldn’t stand by themselves if they wanted to – Castle is a talented and experienced songwriter with an impressive back catalogue – but the idea of Camelot as a psychic space gives the album a sense of multi-dimensionality, which allows for layered readings and repeated listenings.
It’s rare that an album of such intellectual depth is this accessible, but Castle imbues her songs with wit, candour and melodic charm. There is more musical flesh on the bones here than on her gauzy, folky sixth album, Monarch Season (2020). Piano, drums, and Owen Pallet’s string arrangements all have their roles, and Cass McCombs pops up to provide guitars on the free-flowing, Angel Olsen-like country-folk-rock of Lucky #8. Blowing Kisses, released as the album’s first single earlier this year, is a gorgeous piano-led ballad, like an alt-country Carole King. Here the album’s existential themes come to the fore, as Castle sings, ‘I’m so proud of this moment/in the simulation here with you/I’m so fucking honoured’, before reframing the intelligent design argument against the prettiest of outros.
The title track, which opens the album, presents complex ideas with a languid, easy-going melody and a sly reference or two to Castle’s fellow Canadian, Neil Young. In fact, Camelot sits somewhere between After the Goldrush and On the Beach in terms of tone and theme. Some Friends sees Castle return momentarily to her more folky, acoustic guise. The album’s dissection of the ideas of dichotomy and conflict is never more keenly felt than in lines like ‘Some friends come with two different faces/one on the moon recite bright and beaming verses/and one on the sun as hot as a curse is’. On Trust, Castle lays out her disgust at large-scale hypocrisy with pithy, catty put-downs before starkly admitting that she doesn’t have the answers.
Castle has a distinctive and highly original way with words. On Louis, she approaches loss and grief from a new angle. The final verse, cruising in on globules of bass, eruptions of strings and ecstatic backing vocals, is particularly striking:
But in my northeast aura
I sense a canyon of goo
I’ll conjure the unicorns, they’ll fight too
Pleiades, this one’s for you
The fountain of youth and the blue lagoon.
The bouncy, sax-heavy West Coast country-soul of Full Moon in Leo conceals deeper messages about fame, fate, friendship and mysticism. Mary Miracle shimmers on Garth Hudson-esque organ, while Earthsong is a stripped-back, Adrianne Lenker-style acoustic jewel of a song, simultaneously cryptic and charged with emotion. Closer Fractal Canyon is a swelling mini-epic full of unexpected lyrical details and growing in multiple directions at once. The song contains moments of joy and uncertainty, and finishes on a note of hope, as Castle sings, ‘I’m not alone here,’ referring perhaps to the world she has built up around herself, her own personal Camelot, but also the wider world with all its obvious imperfections. And she is not alone because her art – the art of the songwriter – is ultimately one of connection and humanity.
Camelot (1st November 2024) Paradise of Bachelors
Buy Camelot here: https://lnk.to/PoB78
You can also hear a track from Camelot in our latest Mixtape: Lost in Transmission – Episode 106
