Greg Jamie is unashamedly preoccupied with the liminal. His new album, Across a Violet Pasture, tilts at the hard-to-hit zone between sleep and waking. This is Old Weird America with a nod to the stranger recesses of British hauntology. The album title sounds like the name of a Virginia Astley song, and that proves a workable shorthand for the kind of atmosphere that Jamie conjures, if not the way he conjures it.
Sleepy melodies that sound simultaneously weird and familiar, warbling vocals, decay and delay, echo and expansion: these are the ingredients that go into Jamie’s heady Americana. Opener, I’d Get Away, sets the tone: cosmic country with hummable melodies and experimental recording techniques, like the Byrds or the Jayhawks, melted down and amalgamated with Broadcast. Beautiful Place, a slowly unfolding album highlight draped in gauzy drones and an on-off martial drum beat, ropes in Josephine Foster for a guest vocal slot. The result is a heady fuzz, disorienting and tantalising.
You are never quite sure whether the piece you’ve just listened to was two or twelve minutes long: the dreamlike nature of these songs mean they work on their own unique timeframes. Nothing here quite feels linear. It’s all multi-dimensional and multi-directional, with different sounds bleeding into each other or pulling a song apart in an unexpected way. When I Die and What Is the Answer employ clarinet and flute to create the vibe of a renaissance fair gone awry, a garden left to rot in saturated colour. All these songs feel like magic mirrors: deceptive, beautiful, perhaps dangerous. Songs that invite you to inverted worlds.
Sunny delights in the same decomposing nostalgia as bands like Fog Lake, and I Wanted More is a beautifully jaded country croon, constantly being pushed off-balance by nagging, jagged echoes but steadied by weeping guitar and wailing violin. It sounds in places like someone attempting to play a Townes Van Zandt or Leonard Cohen song from distant childhood memory.
Occasionally – on Time Has a Way or Heartbeat, for example – a pretty, folky melody will make its way to the surface and stay there for the duration of a song, but a dusty enchantment always lies just underneath. Much of this enchantment comes from Colby Nathan’s unexpected synths, creepy-beautiful guitar lines and perfectly judged production. Nathan, a perfect foil for Jamie’s delicate songwriting, is a master disrupter, bringing in just enough roughness on songs like Wanna Live and making sure there is no lack of depth and nuance. But on the final song, Distant Shore, Jamie strips everything back. His quavering voice and acoustic guitar take centre stage, and the Townes Van Zandt comparisons seem more apposite than ever. It’s a reminder that, for all the uncanny, rootless strangeness of his music, Across a Violet Pasture is built on Greg Jamie’s outstanding songwriting.
Across a Violet Pasture (October 10th, 2025) Orindal