Jamie Lenman – Devolver: Exclusive Album Stream

Devolver, the second solo album from Jamie Lenman, may well be the most eclectic album of his career to date, a smorgasbord of musical styles and elements fused together and filtered through the perspective of one of the country's finest songwriters. The evidence is plentiful; I Don’t Know Anything begins with a bass line that sounds like the procreated offspring of The Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight and Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust. The industrial dirge that permeates throughout Mississippi evokes the dark, twisted downward spiral that percolates throughout the work of Nine Inch Nails. Bones sounds like louche lounge music that’s been hi-jacked by an overdriven bass tone, as if Norah Jones decided to jam with The Melvins after one too many G&Ts.

All these disparate pieces and ideas come together to create an intricate and mysterious puzzle that perfectly reflects the enigmatic musician behind it. Devolver is released through Big Scary Monsters on Friday 27^th October, but those who wish to wrap their minds around the ex-Reuben frontman’s latest effort a little early can do so now by listening to an exclusive pre-release stream of the record below.

Devolver is yet another string to Lenman’s musical bow; not content with mastering jazz, hardcore, folk and swing (as he did on his double-disc 2013 debut solo effort Muscle Memory) he has now turned his hand to a set of 11 songs infused with electronic flourishes and ornamentation, whilst still holding steadfastly onto the visceral, human heartbeat that permeates throughout his body of work. It’s something that he reveals he’s wanted to achieve in his music for a very long time.

“I've been trying to put electronic blips, beeps and beats into my music ever since the second Reuben album (2005’s Very Fast, Very Dangerous). We were all very big fans of Nine Inch Nails and Soulwax, so we were keen to try and push those influences into our music at the time. There are bits and pieces of that on songs such as ‘Blamethrower' and ‘Every Time a Teenager Listens to Drum & bass a Rockstar Dies' and there were even attempts later on with ‘Suffocation of the Soul’ but we could never quite get it right. We were never really confident enough to roll the fader high enough on those elements, so when it came to writing these songs, I thought this was the time where I could really try and push those details into sharp focus.”

Collaborating with his long-time friend, the enigmatic record producer Space (“a hard cat to pin down”) the duo began working through Lenman’s demos, peppering them with digital textures and patterns, whilst still retaining a raw, pure beating human heart. It’s clear that Lenman feels a huge responsibility to deliver something meaningful and substantial, particular at a time where the accessibility of music has the adverse effect of making it seem more disposable than ever before. “If you’re asking people to spend £10 or £15 on a physical copy or even on a download, you want to ensure that you’re making something that feels worthy of their time and money. I want people to feel fulfilled by it.”

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Much like David Bowie’s Blackstar or Science Fiction, the funereal, long-awaited fifth album from Long Island alt-rock quartet Brand New, Lenman has littered Devolver with little nods and references to his previous work; it’s a litany of treasures for his most dedicated fans to unravel. One such secret hidden in plain sight is the ‘M-I-double S-I-double S-I-P-P-I’ refrain, first used in ‘Shotgun House’ (from 2013’s Muscle Memory) and repeated here on the album’s first single ‘Mississippi’.

“My father used to sing a little rhyming song about the Mississippi, that’s what that ‘M-I-double S-I-double S-I-P-P-I’ mnemonic is. I put it in ‘Shotgun House’ as a nod to my Dad who passed away around the time that I was putting Muscle Memory together. It was something I kept singing it over and over in my head but it got all clung up, as if it were a magnet for all the negative thoughts I was having around that time. So ‘Mississippi’ is largely about the negative thoughts that you'd really rather forget and of course, my Dad dying was one of them. It became a byword for bad feelings and memories."

Whilst some of the secrets hidden within the album may take repeated listens before they reveal themselves, one thing is abundantly clear from the off; Devolver is the product of a man who adores and deeply cares about music. Whilst he’s reluctant to be identified solely as the artist that rails, fist clenched and raised towards the sky, against the injustices of the music industry, it is a theme that has permeated throughout Lenman’s oeuvre. The integrity and, above all, honesty of his lyrics is a fundamental ingredient that continues to resonate and instil such a deep-rooted connection and dedication among fans. In that respect of course, Devolver is no different; ‘Body Popping’, with its lines If you’ve never played an instrument / you can still get big and If you cannot do a f**king thing / you can still get big, is a scathing diatribe against superstar DJs and their ilk. ‘Bones’ sardonically calls out those that make soulless, dispassionate music with its central query of I’ve gotta ask what do you do it for? / is it really music you adore?

“If I do have an enemy, it’s lazy, s**t music” Lenman says “and the only weapon I have against that is good music! All the albums I've made have, at some point, made some sort of commentary about the music industry because that's my field. Personally, I find it odd that more artists don't talk about it; if music is your entire f**king life, how can you be in a band and not address, at some point at least, what it’s like to be in a band?”

It’s Lenman’s dedication to music that drives him to speak out with such fervour against what he perceives as the injustices of the music industry. But despite the examples on Devolver, Lenman will be the first to admit that he has mellowed somewhat compared to the twenty-something that wrote such scathing diatribes about the music industry in his youth. “When I was in Reuben, the three of us definitely saw ourselves in a war against s**t music because there was so much of it! Almost every song is me having a go at someone and pointing out what I deem as some kind of social injustice or whatever. I'm much more reluctant to do that these days because when you get older you start to see things from both sides a little more. I guess in a way, I still feel like I’m trying to fight the good fight, although I'm a lesser player in it now than I was back then because that period where I had this great spurt of creativity and all these ideas were pouring out of me? That’s a period I like to call my 20s and that is very much over for me now! I don’t tend to have that many problems with people anymore or rather, if I do, those problems are usually related to conflicts that are so huge that it's not really my place to address them.”

Of course, listening to Devolver, one could easily argue that Lenman’s self-deprecating insinuation that his creativity is waning with age is complete balderdash. But once again, self-mockery is a theme interlaced throughout Devolver, particularly on ‘I Don’t Know Anything’ and the interconnected pairing of ‘Comfort Animal’ and the album’s title track. “I suppose you'd have to blind not to pick up on that theme” Lenman says with a wry chuckle, “and I do feel insignificant but in a positive way! When I say that I’m irrelevant, it’s not a pity party that I’m, having, it’s actually a really positive outlook because I think it frees you! It’s super-liberating to just say, ‘Hey man, I don’t know a f**king thing! I’m just a speck of sand on this big rock floating through space.'”

I tell Lenman that his sense of emancipation reminds me of famous American cosmologist Carl Sagan’s reflections on Pale Blue Dot, a photograph taken of the Earth at a distance of 6billion kilometres by the Voyager 1 space probe on Valentine’s Day in 1990. “It's funny that you talk about the planets and what not” Lenman chimes in “because I began exploring those themes on (Reuben’s last album) In Nothing We Trust, particularly on that last song ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’. It’s about two brothers walking on Westers Hill and they’re having a terrible time after one of them cuts his leg on a fence. One brother picks up a rock and says to the other, ‘This is a rock that has been here for a million years, before humans even existed and it'll continue to be here long after humans have gone. Think about the vast universe we live in and the tiny space that we occupy in it and I bet after that, you're bleeding leg won’t seem so bad will it!’ It’s the idea that we’re tiny specks of light in a vast, cavernous universe and if you think of things in that way, it alleviates a lot of pressure. Whenever I get a bit too big for my boots or I start believing my own press when people say flattering things about me, I bring myself back to that idea. I don’t devalue the nice things that people say, but it’s good to remember sometimes that, at the end of the day, I’m just a guy that writes a few rock songs.”

Devolver is available to preorder via Big Scary Monsters on Vinyl, CD and digitally and will be released on Friday 27th October. Jamie Lenman begins a 12-date UK tour in support of the album on 1st February 2018