Jorja Chalmers - Human Again (Italians Do It Better)

The synth-based tracks of Jorja Chalmers’s deep-dreaming debut Human Again are a cartography of unreal things that feel very real indeed

Red drapes billow in the night as Human Again materialises on your internal event horizon. You stop and listen as Jorja Chalmers’s debut album takes hold of your imagination, the outdoors manifesting inside, around where you sit – now a little less comfortably. For these twelve tracks are a cartography of unreal things that feel very real indeed.

Chalmers is an Australian multi-instrumentalist who regularly plays alongside Bryan Ferry, in whose London studio she pulled together these made on tour hotel room recordings. That the album was mixed by Dean Hurley and Johnny Jewel at Asymmetrical Studio only adds to the burgeoning mythology. Human Again is, as David Lynch would say, a beautiful thing and it would seem that Chalmers has found the perfect vessel for her solo work in Italians Do It Better.

The velvety dream pop embrace and sensual vocals of “Human Again” are like the pull upon a distant star. “Red Light” sees subconscious engines fired up and powered on through the darkness; where the synth creak and creep of John Carpenter stalks the innocent listener with brain-burrowing, drawn-out hooks. A restrained electronic breathing from the depths, “She Made Him Love Again” rides viscous ambient waves beyond somnambulant territories. Kate Bush peels off her face to reveal the brightest light imaginable, from behind which – only just perceptible in a psychic flash – Julee Cruise peers out. The future crash of “Copper Bells” storms the sonic corridors of the album. It’s a deadly beatless synth pulse that evokes the 2029 scenes from The Terminator; an action score to a ruined dystopia as unremitting as it is addictive. “No Words” is then an Angelo Badalamenti-esque punctuation point; terribly beautiful, seductively sad.

“Suburban Pastel” becomes the witching hour made hyperreal in sonic form as flashes of Dario Argento’s saturated colours dance across the mind’s eye. Whereas “This is Where the Sky Begins”, with its lonesome saxophone winding a path through the edgelands between waking and sleep, feels as if it could be the score to a revisionist 1930s-set noir picture. Chalmers invokes a fragile mood here, that the slightest disruption might cause to tumble apart, yet she wins the balancing act and maintains the dream. It is left to “Ship in the Sky” to bring matters to a close, but rather than drifting back towards reality – outside of the world of the album – she delves further. For Jorja Chalmers’s work here recalls nothing less than Badalamenti’s theme to Mulholland Drive, similarly triggering submersion into a mystery whenever heard, whatever the circumstances.