Spectreview: Béret – Jesus White

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Post punk’s been around for close to half a century now, but as far as classic rock genres go it’s aged pretty gracefully. Part of that has to do with its guitars. Perhaps its their non-traditonal chord voicings, or their signature painterly quality, but post-punk guitars feel like they carry the torch in how they carry the ability to cut straight into your organs, the way power chords once used to.

Jesus White, Ian Kurtis Crist’s third album under Béret, is almost all guitars and voice, and its best trick is how it smartly puts the brunt of its weight on those defining textures. Many tracks don’t have snares and kicks vying for attention, leaving a ton of space for the guitars to work their magic. Waterfall strums flood Blackstar-esque opener “Beauty in Perversion”; piercing downstrummed eights provide the heartbeat for the missive “White Hole” and Primary Colours pastiche “Solace”; slow-plucked chords add a solemn post-rock regality to “World Revolves Around Me.” None of these sound over-engineered, and that’s mostly to do with the quality of the recordings. It’s obvious Crist took the time to make sure these tracks sounded as good as they could be before handing them to the mixers, and it shows. As a showcase of textural integrity, Jesus White boasts some of the best instrumental work we’ve seen this year, and part of its power comes from feeling those crystalline strings wrap around your surroundings. On top of that, everything’s so much more centered on melody than previous Béret records, and that adds a crucial element of accessibility to this new LP.

Crist’s vocals are the other side of the coin, and for the most part they’re equally effective. His voice never stays in one place for too long, tailoring his delivery to whichever iconic act makes the best sense in reference. On “Book of Hera’s” admittance of codependence it’s the dispassionate drawl of Lou Reed; in the floating dirge of “Time Like Fluid” it’s the parabolic bohemian bounce of Thurston Moore; on the superb paean to echo chambers “Fade Out the World” it’s a cross between Jonathan Richman’s plaintive speak-sing and Morrissey’s lilting plateaus. As a vocalist, Crist rarely stops in one place for too long, and that’s an interesting reversal of what art-punk records usually sounds like: instead of maintaining one voice and letting the guitars dip into various paints, it’s the other way around here. It’s a confident showing, though there’s some slight lyrical inelegances peppered throughout, perhaps a clunky rhyme here or there or some turn of phrase that runs cliché to what we expect from this style of music. That’s mostly overridden by the bluntness of Crist’s words, all classically post-punk declaratives on the state of humanity that are effectively resonant, especially in those shining walls of guitar. By cutting his arrangements down to a few instruments and leaning on the simple pleasures of guitar texture, Crist makes Jesus White feel positively monolithic: certainly his best, most accessible album yet.

Recommended with the feeling of wind on your skin.