Album Review: JaYne, Pass The Test

Across her debut album Pass The Test, JaYne channels a wonderfully singular perception of her native Limerick city. Hers is a sensibility doused in jazz and soul. Indeed, long before she serenades us on boss track ‘John Coltrane’, you know damn well that she has been spinning Trane & Co. since she was knee high to a grasshopper.

Then suddenly, a wonderful avant-jazz breakdown steers you into another room, another place. The experimentation is surprising and audacious, like hearing a marching band several floors below, or a wireless crackling from a neighbour’s windowsill.

This a record that struts the streets of an alternative Munster. Indeed, at times, it soars above it, watching the bubbling city far below. Through the sensual Saturday nights and dreamy Sunday mornings of ‘Charlie’, the listener wanders across “Dancefloors, whiskey sours, lost souls, wallflowers.”

The jazz-blues of ‘Netflix & Breakfast’, meanwhile, charts the blood, sweat and tears it takes to create an album such as this. ‘Sucker’ twists the radio dial across Britney Spears and Billie Holiday, complete with hedonist pursuits and hopeless love affairs.

The inclusion of snippets of studio outtakes throughout the album proves a savvy method of further mapping the universe of JaYne, which is as irresistible as it is alluring.

8/10