“Summer of Love” - The new JESS RIBEIRO album
Across the ten tracks on Jess Ribeiro’s incoming new album “Summer of Love”, she traverses isolation, loss, tiny snatches of love, expectation versus reality, once-in-a-century pandemics and healing. It was written and recorded during a particularly unstable time, with Ribeiro living in nine different houses across a two year period, including six months in a church outside of the city, “That instability affected my mental health,” she says. It also created the spark for her fourth album, on which she transfixes audiences as she digs deep into the present, past, and future.
The first demos for “Summer of Love” were put down at a solar-powered shack by Jess with her friend and musical collaborator Dave Mudie (Courtney Barnett, Super American Eagle), an experience that wasn’t without excitement: “We used all the solar power trying to record. It ended with us around a fire for the rest of the night, terrified that the boars were going to get us.”
From there, she recorded the album with Nick Huggins on Wautharong Country in Point Lonsdale, with special guests Jim White (Dirty Three, Xylouris White,) on drums, Darcy McNulty on saxophone, folk-diviner Leah Senior on keys, James Seymour on bass, Davie Mudie taking percussion duties, Carrie Webster’s violin and viola, and Huggins himself chipping in on bass, tape and drum loops, synth, guitars and piano. The way in which the album came together with her collaborators - separately, but towards the same north star - is where the beauty in the work is experienced. “It was improvised and experimental, musicians could only visit on eat a time due to the restrictions, half of the musicians never even came to the studio”.
PRESS on JESS RIBEIRO
MOJO (album review - ⭐⭐⭐⭐) - “Slow rollers 'Everything is Now’ and ‘Jump The Gun’ are dusted with sax, keys and strings, their implacable hooks expressed in a voice evoking Joanna Newsom, Nico and Kirstin Hersh.”
Rolling Stone (album review - ⭐⭐⭐⭐) - “ Summer of Love is both surreal and strikingly direct in equal measure, Ribeiro’s voice so up front in the mix that it’s like a close friend leaning in to tell you the secrets of the universe... swirling like a storm set to break at any moment with Ribeiro fearlessly positioned at the centre.”
UNCUT (album review) - “She coos like Polly Harvey on “Helicopter”, while a skeletal, skittish “Everything is Now” recalls Cat Power’s muted vulnerability, but “The Trees & Me” best illustrates the record’s slowly unfurling beauty.”
The Guardian (this month’s Critics Pick) - “Ribeiro’s greatest quality is her voice: diaphanous and transportive, able to convey vast oceans of grief and injury”
Beat Magazine (album review) - "Summer Of Love's profound intimacy galvanises genuine active listening throughout.”
