Djesse Vol 4. : Jacob Collier releases the Worst Album of the Year

Djesse Vol 4. : Jacob Collier releases the Worst Album of the Year

I’m writing this on my Notes app while sitting on the john because this is where I feel most connected to the sounds on Jacob Collier’s newest album “Djesse Vol. 4.” This album is the fourth album in a four-album series released under the name “Djesse” with the four albums being named as volume one and so on, of four albums. Four albums. 

Collier is a multi-instrumentalist from London, England who was born with a unique attribute known as “perfect pitch,” a rare genetic trait that causes those who have it to bring it up every five minutes. People afflicted with perfect pitch are also able to recognize, identify and recreate pitches with unbelievable accuracy. It would be a mark of genius if those with it weren’t so insufferable. 

“Djesse Vol. 4” is a convoluted mess that doesn’t know what it wants to be. With an hour-long track list and the production elements of a major label project, Collier is incapable of creating more than three or four complete songs. In an attempt to ‘break from theory’ and push music’s boundaries ‘off the staff,’ we have something more unoriginal and uninspired than margarine. The only consistent element on the entire record is a choir compiled of clones of Collier’s voice, layered over itself one-hundred thousand times, and I’m not exaggerating that number. 

Each track contains snippets (verses, choruses, bridges) of several different musical styles and then mashes them together to create “Frankenstein’s Monster” of musical abominations. The opening track “100,000 Voices” starts with an audio montage of what Collier hears throughout his day: street cars, car horns, bustling people, all culminating into a brief silence before settling into the recognizable sound of an orchestra warming up. 

Not a bad set-up; I’m on board so far. That is, until the choir kicks off the THX Deep Note. Collier begins singing the melody, but in a significantly higher range than the bass(ic) lawn he’s typically mooing in. His middle-range singing has a much nicer tone, and an incredible clarity that, with additional help from the mixing, has a bright punch to it, like a streak of baby blue on a painting of the ocean.  

However, it quickly becomes evident that Collier’s lyrics are meaningless: “Bring me back to life, I feel that ocean of love / The waves come crashin’ down / Let the constellation, let me take you to the sky inside my heart / When the shadows fall.” The man can’t write lyrics to save his life; they’re just strings of tied-together clichés without any sort of story, theme or ‘aboutness.’

As the first verse begins to build he does something significant: he strips back the instrumentation. In this passage, there’s only the drums, a bass and his voice. Peeling away the mounds and mounds of dead skin, Collier achieves a clarity that he never gets with his gluttonous choirs. 

Collier demonstrates that he is not only born with a lot of talent, he also has some semblance of taste. If he could learn to suppress his indulgences more I think he has a great album in him, but currently he’s just drowning in his own self. This glorious moment lasts for 52 seconds until it craps all over itself and devolves again into an over-saturated mess. Well, it was nice while it lasted.

The album has about an hour of material so I won’t cover all the tracks because they can be summed up collectively. With a few exceptions, Collier cannot complete a single song on any of the tracks. It’s like he recorded 30 seconds of a song, and tied it to 30 seconds of another, combining clashing snippets of reggaeton, europop, worship and metal. 

Now, this could work in concept for a mixtape or a single song, but he does this for AN ENTIRE HOUR. I can only compare it to the sensation of being stuck in traffic with someone who is on aux and they skip every song halfway through the first chorus. The album never slows down to breathe and inhabit an idea– it just leaps to some new style, genre or song. The music is playing, but there’s no momentum and the listener is left idling for an hour. 

The worst offense of this entire album is the atrocity that is, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” a cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s 1970 hit. I don’t think this had to be anything like the original track, but I wish it was anything other than what it became. 

The original recording is an exercise in restraint; Garfunkel spends the first verse accompanied by only a piano and an occasional pluck on the bass, but it grows incrementally over the course of several verses. The build-up on that song is refined to a perfect pace and climaxes with Garfunkel bringing it home with a heart-shattering final chorus. Collier strips all of that away and fills it with gobbly gook. 

Collier replaces the background piano with a choir of Colliers doing their best impression of the music from the opening theme of Walt Disney’s “Cinderella,” but belting clashing chords that I know he would describe as incredibly complex: “a minor G third, with an augmented fifth on the seventh toe,” but regardless, it clashes. Those chords might “work” in theory, but they don’t deliver or compel anything in harmony with the song itself.

 The original song isn’t good because of the chords and harmonies, it’s because it is a perfect blend of composition and performance-driven emotion. That emotion only comes if the build-up is there to develop it, but because of Collier’s wild chords, that ascention is absent and the song falls apart. That’s not even mentioning the awful features from John Legend and Tori Kelly, who can both sing, but who oversell their parts with these gaudy belts and overly-meticulous vocal runs. 

Despite my badgering I meant what I said; there are moments where Collier shows brilliance and genuine potential. “Summer Rain” stays one song for the most part, “Never Gonna Be Alone” has a great guitar solo delivered by John Mayer, and “Witness Me” is probably the closest thing to a compelling song on the record. The first verse by Collier is bland, but Shawn Mendes of all people delivers a verse that finally made me start to feel something. I don’t know who had a hand in mixing Mendes’, but I have never heard him sound so warm, evocative and organic. His voice has an incredible tone, and though his lyrics go nowhere, he at least began to create a scene, and this track stays the same song from start to finish. Bravo. 

This horrid, overgrown mess finally finishes itself off with the final lap of three tracks that are all wildly too long. Like a volcano, or the silver horns of the Lord proclaiming the rapture, millions of voices fall from Collier’s outstretched hands and smite the listener right into the ground. He throws his entire arsenal of plug-ins and backing tracks to smother the listener in a deluge of garbage. There’s a sea of voices all doing different things and the last 15 minutes are a nauseating headache. 

“Box of Stars Pt.1 and 2” sound as if “Jupiter” from Gustav Holst had a baby with the CD catalog of a local Goodwill, and the final track, “World O World” is a back-slapping, self-congratulating exercise in “burping the worm.” This elegy for the “Djesse” album series couldn’t come soon enough, and as I flush the toilet and close my Notes app, the conclusive, echoing lyric of “Goodbye” on repeat is all I have to say as he presents us with the deluxe edition of this album.