"Look of Love" by The Jezabels

Imagine if Australian Kate Bush locked Matt Berninger inside an Outback Steakhouse refrigerator, then commandeered The National to be her backing band. Her down-undah lilt declaring: “Look at me. Look at me! I’m the captain now.” That’s The Jezabels, and by all rights they should be huge. Arena tours, magazine covers, the whole pop industrial complex ought to be united behind the Sydney quartet.

They began their recording career with a trio of EPs that absolutely bang front to back. Three full-length albums followed. I am nothing if not terminally a fantasy-reading child at heart, and believe trilogies are the only correct way for any media to be presented. The Divine Comedy. Lord of the Rings. Olsen sisters. Critics were generally quite kind to The Jezabels first and third records—not so to The Brink.

The Jezabels’ second album was too gauche. Too much synth. Too much sap. So obviously it’s my favorite one. Singer Hayley Mary called it her most personal album, which was really saying something after the naked aching of a song like “Hurt Me.” (One of my all-time favorites.) Critics nitpicked the schmalzy lyrics—with more than one reviewer panning songs “about pickup trucks.” Guess which song we’re talking about!!!

First, a ton of context.

I think some bands get a bad rap because of their perceived indie hipster credentials. The assumption appears to me, to be that these bands are Too Cool For School, willfully obtuse, and aggressively melancholic in their detachment. They are so good at being so sad and misunderstood, and that pisses people off. “Be literal! Enough of this navel gazing,” angry audiences demand. The argument seems to me, that artifice precludes the notion of honesty. Wrapping your feelings in a metaphor is evasion, a half-truth at best. The standards are unevenly applied—or our individual tolerance for illusion and allusion varies from day to day. Honesty can only be raw and painful: heart on the sleeve or stomped to pieces on the ground.

Melancholy indie bullshit contrasts with music like pop-country, that treads the familiar ground of “Let’s drink, dance, and have sex while unironically wearing cowboy hats.” Which don’t get me wrong, is sometimes exactly what I want to hear. Pickup trucks, we should note, are another trope of pop-country. Pop-country has its own valid criticisms, but that’s not what I’m litigating today. From some musicians we expect and demand the diary confessionals that soothe our hearts’ voyeurs. “Ah yes,” we say. “My ugly insides look just like that. Thank you for showing everyone so I don’t have to.” “Hurt Me”, I’ll reiterate, nails this expectation. And it’s that last word, expectation, at the crux of things.

Music, like most (all?) art, has two important tools: expectation and surprise. Chord progressions sound “good” because they resolve. C, then G, then A, and F, we have a complete circle. Ours ears are attuned to expect resolution and take pleasure in it. There’s much to speculate on as to why this is—our ability to recognize patterns gives us an imagined insight into the future, our predictions coming true mean we survive another winter, some evolutionary shit. Rhyming hits the same note. If we’ve picked up on the rhyme scheme, knowing how one line ends gives us an idea of how the next might. Within these confines there’s endless room for experimentation. A chord progression can be left unresolved to build tension. A rhyme can be slanted with a word we didn’t see coming. That’s surprise, baby. Yes, we like to have our expectations met, but even more so we enjoy seeing them upended in exciting and new ways that will eventually become familiar as a pair of favorite jeans. Solos are a prime example here, where the melody, made familiar early in the composition, gets mutated and morphed. All this you probably already know instinctually or explicitly if you’ve studied music. I’m not a musician and to me this shit is magic.

So, when The Jezabels, like any artist, came out swinging in their sophomore effort, people had expectations. For some, that expectation was a slump, and they decided they were right: the music was weak and they knew it would be. Others expected greatness in the same vein as the EP trilogy or 2011’s Prisoner, and they were left baffled and disappointed. Still others expected something new, different, strange, and these folks were just as ready for disappointment as the first, but they got what they really wanted.

“You got me lit up with a look of love, / I could take you in a pickup truck, / like I’m joking / but I’m talking roughly the truth.”

 “Look of Love” begins with an acknowledgement that perhaps the narrator’s desire is corny, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t “roughly the truth.” The rest of the song is spent dancing around the goal of that unabashed love. There’s the adorable line “I think of every frickin’ chance that I blew.” The word should obviously be “fucking” right? Or maybe “second”? Surely anything other than this Good Place censorship joke. If you feel that strongly say fuck about it! I replace the word myself whenever I sing along. Maybe they were angling for radio-friendly, but one can have an explicit album-version. This is only the first verse, however, and the narrator is still working her way up to it.

She says, “In the dead of night, I could give into your love.” Only under cover of darkness does she feel comfortable admitting how deeply she feels. Is it corny to admit you feel observed when you’re in love? We live in a surveillance state, and we’re always acting for ourselves, each other, the ever-present cameras. We’ve grown comfortable in our performances. It’s honesty we’re afraid of showing, because vulnerability, as any contestant on the Bachelor can tell you, opens you up to heartbreak. This pre-chorus remains unresolved, building wonderful expectations as it slips back into the verse.

“I’m gonna lick it like sugar, Lord, / then I’ll choke you. / Think I’m not that sort? / Well, I could be. / I could be so happy with you.”

God doesn’t this verse rule? It’s like Mary predicted the critical response denigrating her lyrics as “too saccharine”. She makes this joke! About sugar! What a good double entendre. Which expectation of her do we have? That she can’t be convincingly sweet because of an EP like She’s So Hard, or that she can’t be tough enough to literally choke you? Either way, she could be so happy with you. I think this where critics are getting caught up. They liked The Jezabels as simple aggrieved badasses (dare we say, as Jezebels?) and didn’t believe Mary could sing of happiness with as much passion as she did of pain.

It isn’t all easy though, as the chorus finally swells it gets complicated, “Your love’s a spider web; / when I shut it out of my mind, / you get spinning again.” Ok so I guess the critique here is that spiderwebs are cliché. Sure whatever. Be a curmudgeon about it; I’ll write a 1300-word defense eight years after the album’s release, that’ll show ‘em! This metaphor gets expanded in the song’s final refrain, “We’ll get spinning again.” Aha! No longer the simple power-imbalance of predation as alluded to before—spider versus its next meal—but rather the two are equal partners, spinning a web together. Couple this with the bumping synths, warm as pastel pink pillows, and the image conjured isn’t arachnids, but dancers, gleefully twirling.

This last section trades the conditional “could be” for the affirmative, “I am always happy with you.” Where she began self-consciously joking about pickup trucks (ugh, how country of me), she’s embraced the image, unafraid of her love unadorned by metaphor. “Look of Love” is a radical defense of honesty in an irony-poisoned world. This isn’t roughly the truth, its proof the truth doesn’t have to be so rough.

That’s it for this week. What are your thoughts on expectation and surprise in art? Do you read music reviews? Do you hate listen to anything? Email me. I love your opinions.