Right here’s an incomplete solid of characters that populate The Idiot, Younger Jesus’ provocative seventh album: a pair of washed-up outlaws, an aged man totally reliant on his kids, a health care provider who will get caught creeping on his affected person’s social media, and, on “MOTY,” a menagerie of backyard selection misogynists, hypocrites, and insecure momma’s boys fronting as alpha males. Oh, and the one who will get misplaced of their reminiscences of being abused as a baby and involves, a long time later, standing over a canine they’ve simply crushed.
But, essentially the most unnerving characters are those John Rossiter permits us to imagine are himself—artists who’ve witnessed the life-saving powers of artwork firsthand and seen it curdle into condescension, delusions of grandeur, and revulsion in direction of the individuals most like him. Whereas Rossiter hasn’t confirmed whether or not any of The Idiot is autobiographical, it’s an unsparing, indelible product of a person who needed to query each one in all his inventive motivations earlier than making essentially the most very important album of his life.
Rossiter’s interrogative method—to pop music, to literature, gender norms, to the social contract, to fact itself—serves because the connective tissue all through Younger Jesus’ fascinating discography, which has earned professional comparisons to the Maintain Regular, Speak Speak, and Albert Ayler. However there’s additionally the one remnant of Rossiter’s formative period as a hard-drinking Midwestern storage rocker: the impulse to blow all the things up on the verge of a traditional success. After 2015’s Develop/Decompose introduced Younger Jesus’ preliminary part as Chicagoland barstool bards to a wider viewers, Rossiter moved to Los Angeles and did what transplants do: experimented with spirituality, acquired into free jazz, and began ebook golf equipment. A trilogy of exploratory albums adopted, every one tantalizingly near a masterpiece. However resulting from burnout—or simply the sense that Younger Jesus’ incarnation as a post-rock jam band had turn out to be its personal type of components—Rossiter disbanded the group and launched the stripped-down Shepherd Head; like all Younger Jesus albums, it felt transitional, however this was the primary time that Rossiter lacked conviction in his route.
The Idiot doesn’t have that drawback. The opening duo of “Brenda & Diane” and “Two Brothers” brings Younger Jesus again to their roots—gleaming acoustic strums and brassy synth washes, a gruff man singing imperiously of the downtrodden making an attempt to guard their dignity, the type of issues that will get referred to as “heartland rock” in 2024; certainly somebody as studious as Rossiter acknowledges the evocative nature of their respective titles. Whereas most of Younger Jesus’ work on Saddle Creek trafficked in dialectics, arcane philosophical tracts, and 15-minute jam periods, The Idiot will get proper to the purpose, with Rossiter placing his belief in direct statements—“Real love is just a little bit like hell,” the goddamn American Dream, ideas dismissed as cliche till time and expertise reveals their enduring fact. In direction of the tip of “Two Brothers,” Rossiter meets a humble gardener who works the Earth to get nearer to God, which might’ve been too pat of a literary gadget had Rossiter not briefly stop music to review permaculture.
