Pale Jay
Low End Love Songs
Colemine/Karma Chief Records [2024]
Album Overview: Pale Jay joined the Colemine/Karma Chief stable last year with his debut LP, Bewilderment. That album showed a lot of promise over its eight tracks, blending various soul and funk styles while keeping things grounded in solid songwriting and confessional lyrics. With Low End Love Songs, Pale Jay shows that his first album wasn’t a fluke while solidifying his signature sound.
Musical Style: Fans of Bewilderment should feel immediately at home when they drop the needle on Low End Love Songs. The former album’s soulful, keyboard-heavy sound remains intact on the latter, as do the hip-hop-influenced beats, brass section accents, and occasional string arrangements. Pale Jay’s falsetto vocals are the main attraction, though, their smooth, syrupy quality binding each track together like glue.
Evolution of Sound: Low End Love Songs doesn’t depart too much from Bewilderment, which could be seen as a lack of development or as consistency, depending on your point of view. One of my only complains about Bewilderment was that its eight songs seemed a bit slight, especially since the album only weighed-in at around 24 minutes. Not only is Low End Love Songs moderately more substantial in both number of tracks (nine) and length (closer to 30 minutes), the songs themselves seem to have some added complexity in their arrangements. It’s not a massive leap forward, but it does feel like a refinement of what made the previous album so appealing.
Artists with Similar Fire: Enjoying falsetto singing is a prerequisite for liking Pale Jay’s brand of funky neo-soul, but if you dig artists like Aaron Frazer, Curtis Mayfield, or Bobby Oroza, you should find plenty to appreciate in Pale Jay’s approach.
Pivotal Tracks: “Quadris de Ouro” (Portuguese for “Golden Hips”) is an early standout, its slightly off-kilter feel heavy on the strings and horns underlined by some Latin-influenced percussion. Follow up “Baby” might contain the album’s best backing track, though, with its electric piano, gently picked electric guitar, somber horns, and heavy beat creating the perfect backdrop for Pale Jay’s vocals. “The Garden” is another highlight, with some great harmony vocals laid atop an organ-heavy arrangement. Other standouts include opener “The Simple Days,” “Floating On A Memory,” and penultimate track “Love Around The World.”
Lyrical Strength: Like on Bewilderment, many of the tracks on Low End Love Songs deal with relationships in some way. Most are written from first- and/or second-person perspectives, which gives them an intimate quality while also allowing the listener to empathize and relate to the singer’s point of view.
PALE JAY REVIEW HISTORY
Bewilderment (2023)
PALE JAY LINKS
Facebook | Instagram | Bandcamp | Colemine Records
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