- Jam City's latest LP highlights the overlooked, sometimes unglamorous parts of formative clubbing experiences via sprightly, engaging pop music.
- It's Saturday night. Your friends pile into an old sedan and shoot down the road, windows down, passing a bottle of cheap champagne over the centre console, with an approaching skyline in the distance. You have no idea where you're going, but you're on the way. You tune the radio to Earthly FM.
Jam City records paint pictures of specific environments, their individual sound palettes hinting at larger imagined worlds with fully-developed casts of characters. On 2012's Classical Curves (which was reissued for its tenth anniversary last November), the atmosphere was cold and sterile, reminiscent of the corporate sheen of hypermodern malls and hotels. 2020's Pillowland, on the other hand, conjured wide open cityscapes and grainy beachside sunsets through wailing guitars, scuzzy beats and shimmering psychedelia. But on his latest album (and debut for Diplo's Mad Decent label), Jack Lantham turns back to a vision of the club—just not the club you might expect.
Where Classical Curves recontextualized fragments of house, techno and club genres from the US East Coast, EFM leans more directly into house, breaks, guitar-driven soul and 80s dream pop—a mix foreshadowed by the latest episodes of his Earthly mix series on NTS, and his 2015 left turn Dream A Garden. Layering classic house beats with saccharine pop hooks, Lantham goes for a strikingly honest sound built equally for tender, melancholic moments and hands-in-the-air revelry. There's an undeniable euphoria that builds when the first few notes of the bassline come in on "Reface," a driving house track with swelling pads, breakdowns and drops that build to a predictable but totally effective payoff.
Instead of rebuilding club music from the ground up, EFM toys with familiarity. Latham points out, however, that "this isn't rave nostalgia." Instead of basing his vision of the club on the well-worn narratives of scene-defining DJs and venues, Latham chooses to populate EFM's world with stories of the unglamorous lives of "everyone else: the dancers and bouncers and people doing drugs with the mafia."
There's a sense of adolescent hedonism that runs throughout the record, recalling memories of the in-between times spent searching for excitement, tracking down what to do next. "Redd St. Turbulence," with its anxious, distorted arpeggios and quickly-paced kicks, feels like the soundtrack to finally receiving that text with a location, then hitting the gas hard til you get there.
The feeling is laced through the album's accompanying videos, which play like fragments of nights out you're not supposed to see. Through these brief scenes, Latham plugs into a collective history, one of hometown boredom and amorphous suburban landscapes. These events could have happened anywhere and to anyone.
EFM's portrayal of youthful abandon comes from a cast of guest vocalists who detail the ephemeral emotions of nights out past. There's a sweetness with which Aidan delivers the album opener's chorus: "I don't really know about love, but when you touch me…" or how Empress Of croons about innocent exploration in "Wild n Sweet," singing, "No one has to notice / I can't breathe, can you keep a promise? / Show me love, all we have is silence / Comfort me, do it with your body." Here, Jam City paints romantic pictures of impulsive escapism, but he also argues that these fleeting moments are the ones that stick with us the longest.
EFM plays like a club record for the uninitiated, for those outside of the major urban centres where club culture "happens." But Latham makes the case that those aren't the only places worth paying attention to—sometimes all it takes is like-minded friends that get together to revel in their own version of the perfect night out. For those who get it, the club can be anywhere: a flat, your friend's car or a dimly lit park. To quote "LLTB"—it really doesn't matter.
Tracklist01. Touch Me feat. Aidan & Clara La San
02. Times Square feat. Aidan
03. Do It feat. Aidan
04. Wild n Sweet feat. Empress Of
05. Reface feat. Aidan
06. LLTB feat. Wet
07. Tears at Midnight
08. Be Mine feat. Aidan
09. Redd St Turbulence
10. Magnetic