Hannah Jadagu’s Describe Breaks Up With Simple Classifications

Years from now, as Jadagu strides ahead as a human and as an artist, will she look back on her sophomore record, Describe, and consider its costs worthwhile? Structurally, the album is scaffolded with the impact her post-Aperture achievements had on her nascent (at the time) bond with an unknown and unnamed party. Jadagu gives away little about this person, and that is, frankly, for the best, because it’s her right to make music from the prickly parts of her private life and, corollary to that, keep those parts private at the same time. Gossip isn’t the point. The point is the twelve tracks’ worth of Jadagu finding the right words, and the right notes, to communicate the knotted-up experience of hopping cross-coasts while leaving your paramour behind.

She makes the ceaseless and frequently mundane suffering wrought from that sound quite lovely, at least, so that’s a checkmark in the “worthwhile” column; if she had to tour for the sake of Aperture, at least she mined inspiration from the hardship. This is the textbook definition of “silver lining,” of course. It’s not as if Describe celebrates what Jadagu felt while on the road, as well as in Altadena, where she set the album down over the course of a summer. If anything, her circumstances strike as if they were a personal Hell, though anyone who knows the burden of long distance romance in the smartphone era may recognize Jadagu’s Hell as universal: talking a tiny screen where the object of your affection is framed by your device’s edges, as a replacement for a rendezvous in the flesh.

It’s a poor trade-off, one Jadagu comes back to several times on Describe’s tracklist: “My Love,” where the motif is made explicit, and “Bergamont,” where instead the same motif is implicit. “Tell me when you’re coming to stay / I’m starting to miss not waking up with your face / And talking on the phone / It’s breaking up what you say?” she breathes on the former; meanwhile on the latter, she sings, “You talk in the night / With a smile so gently / Soon you’re gone Give me a second or / Wait on.” For interpretation’s sake, “Bergamont” is aligned more with dream language than the unique torture of FaceTime dates, but the two do share a certain ephemerality; hanging up after a call with your love can feel a bit like waking up from tender reveries. The difference is knowing that dreams are figments and FaceTime is virtual—techincally more real, but a major psychic tease. A dream seems kinder.

Look at how “My Love” flows straight into “Couldn’t Call,” a piano-and-synth ditty where Jadagu repeats the track’s name, over and over, for a minute and a half; the song amounts to a mere moment in Describe’s 36-minute duration, but the significance of its meaning is impossible to escape. When calling is all you’ve got, the times when it isn’t an option hit hard enough to provoke regret for your feelings. If “My Love” begets “Couldn’t Call,” then “Tell Me That!!!!” reads as a rebuke to “Couldn’t Call,” where Jadagu seems to lament her attachment to her partner. “I don’t wanna need it,” she intones like she’s reciting a mantra, as if the more that she says so, the less her desires will have power over her.

This is a fine tactic for managing a sweet tooth or the impulse to buy a second round of beers at the pub, but an infinitely poorer one for handling matters of the heart. So strong is the force of Jadagu’s attraction that Describe likens it to a form of addiction on songs like “Normal Today” (“Honestly I’m coming down / Do you not notice?”), where a timbrous string accompaniment gives immediacy to her echoing self-reflective; elsewhere “Miracles,” the album’s penultimate song, puts romance and attraction in a semi-spiritual context, as if to suggest that intimacy is an act of faith.

What makes this emotional spiral rich rather than monotonous is Describe’s unfailingly upbeat character. When opening up about the multifaceted sensations of her recent ordeal—the highs of her accomplishments brought low by the guilt of what it took her to make them—Jadagu mixes a blunt confessional quality with ethereal vocals and a broader sound range than what was captured on Aperture two years ago. Music, after all, like any healthy relationship, requires patience, practice, and a healthy dose of variety. Describe foregrounds Jadagu’s guitar work, of course, but against an electronic backdrop that calls to mind the work of artists like Björk; maybe reconciling with her feelings in therapy would have been the cheaper route, compared to her adoption of new instruments in pursuit of new sounds, but that pursuit pays off. This is Hannah Jadagu as remembered on Aperture, but add in a few synths and an uptick in confidence. Heartache will do that to a person. [Sub Pop]

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at “his personal blog.” He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.