Album Retrospective: Jay Som's Everybody Works Is What Modern Indie Rock Needed To Become
Tristan Young @talltristan
Ok crew, this is it. The actual OG dankster of Oakland California. The reason we can definitively confirm that ‘dank’ is in fact good. It’s Jay Som. For EP26 of Beats On Repeat we did a deep dive into Jay Som’s- aka Melina Mae Duterte- 2017 record Everybody Works. One of the very best things about modern music has been the resurgence of solo singer/instrumentalist indie rock as led by young female artists. The clarity and bravery of their once marginalized expressions has been enthralling, and Everybody Works is one of the best examples of this trend. Throughout the short run time Duterte takes the notion of intimate DIY indie pop bedroom rock and manages to insert the full band experience into it. Her lyrics daringly reveal devotion, rejection, introversion, and ultimately, acceptance and catharsis. These are deeply personal stories for her, as her velvety and diminutive voice implies, yet she launches these sentiments into stadium sized gulfs and actually fills them with a dazzling array of instrumental compositions. The celestial synth guitar combo of ‘Baybee’ is a festival banger for the ages, while the true shred guitar of ‘One More Time Please’ will bring down the house. Duterte drags you through an emotional ringer in tracks like ‘Remain’, ‘Take It’, and ‘Everybody Works’, but manages to avoid schlocky melodrama by countering her tone with an irresistibly gleeful and earnestly congenial personality. The first time she joyously shrieks “but I like the bus! I can be whoever I want to be”, in ‘Bus Song’, she’ll have you won you over. Once you reach the grunge pop torrent of ‘One Billion Dogs’ you’ll be singing, “going up up up”, right along with her. These valleys and peaks of devout confidence and timid regret coalesce into the climax of ‘Everybody Works’, a multi tiered cascading chorus that radiates pure elation and gratitude. It’s one of the best single sequences of 2017 and a moment you’ll surely revisit. At 22 when it was released, Duterte was already wise beyond her years but never at the expense of experiencing the pure unadulterated zeal of successfully processing one’s emotions. Check in with EP26 of the show for more of our thoughts on Everybody Works.