JAPE /



It wouldn't be too outlandish to suggest, in this age of byte-size technology and flat-pack aestheticism, that the notion of making an album is essentially an old-fashioned one - too time consuming, expensive, and, ultimately, too damn demanding on an audience already over-burdened with music to digest. Some might say the recording industry is no longer in the hands of entrepreneurs and spin-doctors - it is an asteroid field of fleeting Internet pop anthems, each tune imploding into miniature scions of itself after three minutes of fame.

Dubliner Richard Egan is one of many young pop dreamers cursed with a compulsion to make albums. If there is a purpose for Egan to make an album, maybe it is to turn everyday inarticulate speech of the heart into electronic music that moves you. To put some sort of shape and sound, however abstract, to the fears and anxieties and the highs and lows that pepper a confused state of mind. If there isn't a logical purpose, well don't worry, Jape is going through the motions in spectacular fashion, dredging up surreal childhood memories, awkward teenage benchmarks and brushes with ghosts of Dublin rock stars. Jape's third album RITUAL is ceaselessly fascinating and relentlessly honest, equally body moving as it is soul-searching - physical as it is melancholy.

Three years in the making, RITUAL hits the light at the end of the tunnel in a blaze of soul plummeting ceremony. From the opening shot Jape immerses himself in religious symbolism.

Christopher & Anthony refers to two Catholic saints; the former a venerated watchman over the recovery of all things lost, the latter a Greek martyr commemorated the world over with mass-produced medals symbolic of safe travel. Over a heart-thumping rhythm and spiraling spooky synthesizers he runs with the saints, pondering immortality with neat rhyming analogies: "And if they feed me to the lions / At least a name that's swallowed up somehow gets left behind."

Over the course of this album's conception, Jape evolved from being a prominent underground figure in Ireland, gathering momentum with a critically acclaimed second album The Monkeys in the Zoo Have More Fun Than Me and brushed shoulders with fame as Jack White's The Raconteurs performed his underground hit manta-dirge, "Floating", on their world tour. But it's been Jape's own live shows, big exuberant floor-shaking blowouts of transcendental space-pop that really built the momentum to this release. Many of these songs have molded and mutated and expanded into their current shapes across the stages of Ireland, Britain, throughout Europe and the United States.

Although largely an electronically sculpted entity, the tough sounding instrumentation of RITUAL separates Jape the band from Jape the man. Right-hand man Mathew Bolger, guitarist with The Redneck Manifesto (Egan's other band), and drummer Ross Turner are heard in full effect. One would never guess RITUAL was largely recorded and produced in Jape's own front room.

Inspired by writers such as Bill Callahan and Cass McCombs, Jape's own lyrical skills are peaking. The album is punctuated with several memorable moments of candid wit. Amidst the grinding riffs and trembling synths of I Was a Man , he spills: "I popped my cherry to 'November Rain.'" I think she liked it but don't think she came."

Meanwhile, the irresistible tension melting synthro of Graveyards signals Jape reaching new depths of musical lushness. "It's 4 o'clock in the morning and the world's asleep / the only ones who hear us are beneath our feet," whispers Egan. He diffuses the anxiety of everyday life with a strangely erotic juxtaposition of sex and death.

But Richard Egan doesn't just speak in imaginative clues though. He also talks straight from the heart, as on Phil Lynott for instance, a dedication to the late, great Irish rock hero who appears to Egan in the form of a lunar eclipse during a Mastodon gig.

On the pounding Apple in an Orchard Jape goes in search of the elusive truth and finds there are no answers, no logic, just life. It could be a lynchpin song to the whole album. Egan knows there is a time to be cryptic and a time to step-up and explain himself - something only a truly talented writer can do. "I was jealous of the wind blowing," he states. "And I'm well aware of how stupid that sounds. Let me just explain what I just said / the wind is never born and is never dead /It may as well just stop but it blows on, it blows on."

Every great album needs a conclusively great song to end it. Nothing Lasts Forever is that song; a comforting meltdown of all the angst Egan has expended his energy on throughout RITUAL . For this song Jape makes all his machines sounds emotional.

And if you make it to the end of this album you might discover why Egan took the time to fulfill this arduous RITUAL . Because in light of all this uncertainty and confusion and hollowness, one thing is for certain, music, using its own unique language, somehow makes us feel better.

www.myspace.com/richiejape

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