Jabu - New single: 'Let Me Know' - and new album in September

Jabu, Bristol trio of great contemporary and forward-thinking talent, has added a second vocalist into their collective and is ready to release their first LP, Sleep Heavy.

I was lucky to meet with one member at the WOMAD Festival in 2015, and to have heard them with Young Echo, quite a few nights in Bristol the same year.

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Here is a presentation by the site Resident Advisor:


Jabu will release their debut album, Sleep Heavy, via Blackest Ever Black in September. 
The LP pairs an R&B sensibility with atmospheric electronics. It's a "meditation on grief, on loss, making sense of separation and death," the label says. Jabu cite Massive Attack, The Temptations and Cocteau Twins as influences. 
The group, which consists of vocalists Alex Rendall and newly-recruited Jasmine Butt alongside producer Amos Childs, grew from the Bristol collective Young Echo. Last year they released a mini-album under the name O$VMV$M, which is their project with fellow Bristolian Neek. They've also had a couple of 7-inches for No Corner, and an EP for Ramp before that. 
Listen to "Let Me Know." 

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Jabu - 'Let Me Know'

Published on 2 Aug 2017

'Let Me Know' by Jabu. Taken from the album Sleep Heavy, due to be released by Blackest Ever Black on September 22, 2017.

Vocals and lyrics by Alex Rendall and Jasmine Butt.
Produced by Amos Childs.

Video directed and edited by Joshua Hughes-Games and Alexander Hughes-Games for MFMFilms.

Choreographed and performed by Charlotte Baker.

© & ℗ 2017 Blackest Ever Black

More information:
http://blackesteverblack.com/releases...

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In their own words:

pre-order up now
out 22/09/17

can't say thank you enough to everyone that helped make this record, from long talks with a very patient Harry Wright listening to more and more abstract and vague artwork suggestions to Andrew Clarkson (& han) allowing me to stay in their house til the small hours going through his records and always being 2 steps ahead of me and pulling out exactly what i needed to hear at any given moment. to chester for allowing us to use the words from his poem for the title of the record. to seb for always being there to listen. & to Alex Hughes-Games, josh & charlotte for taking so much time and effort to make this video 
& to kiran for actually putting the thing out (-barring any last minute changes of heart!)
& to everyone thats played it on radio so far or showed it to their friends etc etc
it means a lot thank you

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JABU - SLEEP HEAVY
(BLACKESTLP016 | CD016 | DL016)

Album out September 22, 2017.

Pre-order LP / CD / download:
https://blackesteverblack.bandcamp.com/album/sleep-heavy

More information:
http://bit.ly/2vt7WC2

Stream 'Let Me Know' (SC):
http://bit.ly/2wlW9St

'Let Me Know' video:
https://youtu.be/9czzvHkLby4

Blackest Ever Black presents Sleep Heavy, the debut album of broken-hearted, downtempo R&B/street-soul and supremely atmospheric, introspective electronics from Jabu: a trio comprised of vocalist/lyricists Alex Rendall and Jasmine Butt, and producer Amos Childs.

The group was born out of Bristol’s Young Echo collective: an ecosystem unto itself which has birthed and nurtured a number of other notable soundsystem-rooted projects and artists to date including Kahn & Neek, Sam Kidel, Ishan Sound, Ossia, Asda, chester giles (the title Sleep Heavy comes from a giles poem) and Killing Sound (Childs with Kidel and Vessel).

Jabu’s previous 7” singles, though arresting, barely hinted at the level of accomplishment and emotional heft that Sleep Heavy delivers. It’s a future Bristol classic with a universal resonance, with songs that are highly personal but deeply relatable, and tripped-out, time-dissolving sound design that both haunts and consoles. It is, first and foremost, a meditation on grief, on loss, making sense of separation and death; but it also looks forward to what might come after the aftermath: healing, acceptance, the chance to begin again.

Childs is one of the most gifted producers of his generation and his work here, grounded in hip-hop but floating free, is a thing of sustained wonder: crepuscular, melancholic – funereal, at times – subtly psychedelic and heavily dubwise, but always concise and purposeful. Stitched together from deep-dug and beautifully repurposed samples, it draws on influences from US R&B to Japanese art-pop minimalism – Mariah to Mariah Carey, if you will – and a rich seam of underground UK soul, boogie, DIY/post-punk, library music and lovers rock; refining and reconstituting these inputs into powerfully immersive, emotionally ambiguous soundscapes as eloquent and engaging as they are understated and bottomlessly mysterious.

There is also of course a distant connection to the Bristol blues of Smith & Mighty and the sultry urban gothic of Protection-era Massive Attack, but Jabu’s orchestration of womb-like ambiences, cold synth tones and brittle beats feel entirely sui generis. They provide the perfect setting for Rendell’s wounded, imploring and carefully weighted vocals, which are no less extraordinary: nodding to giants like Teddy Pendergrass and The Temptations in terms of phrasing and front-and-centre vulnerability, with something of The Associates’ Billy Mackenzie in there too; defeated but defiant. Meanwhile Jas’s heavenly interventions, sometimes leading but more often parsed and layered into tremulous, gossamer abstraction, draw a line between the Catholic choral harmonies of her childhood and the ethereal, oceanic sweep of Cocteau Twins. Oceanic is the word: this is music to drown, and drown gratefully, in.

By its end, Sleep Heavy’s world-weariness is intact and scarcely diminished, but some light has been admitted, and is visible from the sea-floor. A chance, not a promise. Something to swim towards.

Out September 22, 2017 on LP, CD and digital formats.

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