Laura Jean
Amateurs
Chapter Music
4 November 2022
Amateurs, the new album by Laura Jean, is a bit of a mystery. The Australian singer/songwriter has had to answer some tough questions to get to the heart of her music. The Australian anti-art, anti-intellectual culture bearers have made it clear that there is a lack of professionalism in the art establishment. That art and money are somehow connected. Laura Jean notes, “Amateurs means to do something for love, not money, and somehow it’s become a dirty word, shorthand for a failure. These songs arise from my acceptance that I will always be an `amateur’.”
Yet the professionalism of Amateurs comes across right off the bat. On Teenager Again, featuring Aldous Harding and Marlon Williams on guest vocals, an electric guitar slashes almost violently while underneath it, an acoustic delivers something far less so. The song deals with the terror of a teen contending with panic disorder, something she relates to her past and how she tried to overcome this by seeing a psychic, going through Reiki and using ‘Lite and Easy’ to lose weight. Jean eventually ended up on the other side of her problems in a kinder, more forgiving place.
String-laden arrangements created by Erkki Veltheim and recorded by John Lee (the producer of 2018’s Devotion) pitch these songs to a higher plane. On the remarkably professional yet wildly unexpected “Too Much to Do”, Jean is framed against strings that go from being simply plucked to wildly bowed phrases in an instant, creating something of unrestrained power, yet never completely out of control. It is a tightrope walking job of the highest order.
Controlling everything, producer Tim Bruniges manages to keep all the balls in the air while dealing with an artist moving in a variety of styles simultaneously. From the smooth, airy voices of Harding, Williams and Jean on Folk Festival, a song that becomes much edgier in its closing moments, to the piano and string-laden Market on the Sand, Bruniges and Jean find ways to create moments that become far bigger than the individual instruments used.
There are also moments where her memories come alive with a sense of wonder that never seems to go away. A Funny Thing Happened recounts unexplored moments, recalling her mother, who gave up her dreams of singing to become a nurse. Using the lens of time, Jean wonders “about the dreams we have for our life and how many of them are passed down genetically and how many stem from our upbringing. What happens to a dream when you turn away from it? When you have a kid?” She even recollects when her mom came home from an audition screaming that she’d gotten her first part. These are times that remain with us forever.
Despite the choice of the album title, amateur is not a word to describe Laura Jean’s latest effort. It is the work of a sincere professional, one who refuses to be bound by boxes or boundaries. She moves in directions where the weight of her work and the totality of her talent are vast and limitless.
Pre-order Amateurs via Bandcamp: https://laurajeanmusic.bandcamp.com/album/amateurs
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