FIVE YEARS away from music – but Sophie Jamieson has lost not a jot of her musical acuity.
A recording session all that time ago collapsed leaving Sophie uncertain after her lauded debut EP, Where; self-doubt built upon self-doubt and she retreated.
But she’s dusted herself down, going on tour with Charlie Cunningham across Europe last year. Returning self-confidence brought her back to the studio and she released an EP, Hammer, back in February, just before it happened, resulting in a planned tour with Samantha Crain falling by the wayside.
And boy, is that an EP – you can still pick up the vinyl and the CD, and I suggest you maybe ought – that title track is folktronica of the most scalding and sobering stripe.
She debuted the first track from her forthcoming Release EP, “Forward”, last month; we fell for it hard, noting its “confessional elegance.”
And this morning she’s inviting is to explore the seductive depths of the title track from that December EP, “Release”; you can watch the video below. Fail to be enamoured, I dare thee.
After her retreat from recording half a decade ago, Sophie struggled with her mental health; you can hear her sing out some of those demons, her voice cathartic, articulate, swooping, caressing, urging, almost raging.
The short film careers through Soho, looking backwards, on a gathering dusk of social gatherings; have you ever walked among the normal business of a city, so close yet so alienated, your own life snapped, a ghost in the urban machine, a camera only seeing?
The song is instrumentally low-key, with a smattering of electronica texturing; Sophie is the absolute magnetic dead centre of this song, lamenting how someone has ” … let me go / From your kindness / To a new kind of blindness … “. She hits upon a certain beautiful melody-mantra, and fastens to it over the duration of six minutes, the power coming in all the way she articulates those notes in new emotional shades; how she recasts the melody in the soreness of a new lyrical inversion. It’s stunning.
Sophie says: “This song is a search for peace by any means necessary. I wanted to escape how I felt, to blur it and take the edge off it, to indulge in it and then leave it behind.
“It reflects the constant effort to balance feeling too much and feeling nothing; the desperate search for equilibrium that only ever ends in chaos.”
Elsewhere on the EP, she brings us tunes examining time spent in a blissful bubble of self-destruction and the absurd relief she felt in flight as a car knocked her off her bike. It won’t be easy in there, but it will be a beauteous and righteous postcard, dropping just in time for whatever possibly weird and roguish shape the festive season may present as this year.
Keep up with news of the Release EP: follow Sophie on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
