Some musicians act like atomic focal points around which outstanding contributors swirl, like a socialite having weird seven-degrees-of-separation friends in high places. Evan Patterson would be one such tractor beam—a Louisville native with bluesy post-hardcore outfit Young Widows on his CV, through which he’s connected with Kurt Ballou and Nate Newton of Converge fame, and Dean Hurley, who worked wonders with late master David Lynch as the sublime and subliminal sound department on Twin Peaks: The Return, amongst other joint things.
Jaye Jayle, however, is Patterson’s baby: a solo man-and-guitar project that refines his time wading through genres and various groups. It’s now a big full band though, bulky in gothic tone (made all the more so from Patterson low-register croon) that makes their home on Pelagic Records make as much sense as the aforementioned collabs. Members past and present of Jaye Jayle, along with the main man himself, were the backing band for Emma Ruth Rundle’s outstanding On Dark Horses record,followed by Rundle and Patterson’s divorce and this project’s Don’t Let Your Love Life Get You Down record following in 2023.
After Alter also takes some bigger-picture themes too, but (perhaps being in a more reflective mood) Patterson mixes these with elements of humorously mundane surrealism for a thoroughly-rounded portrait of the songwriter guiding it. There’s definitely a fine line between his personal persona and novelistic narrative-driven figures ‘going through stuff’: A Blackout follows a homeless man haunted by a billboard advert he sleeps next to, with music and vocals being completely split between the headphones to reflect mass media culture disorientation amongst the album’s meatiest riff. In the album’s opener, Patterson reflects ideologies of God-fearing people—“faith-filled father fiction, this hell is truth”—told through typically twangy guitars and sound-system bursting bass levels.
In the realm of the Lynchian Roadhouse, that feeling is particularly strong in HELP! and Doctor Green, a hallucinatory trudging blues rocker about “Old Tiger” and “whiplash flashbacks”, and ominous tickled ivories underscore Patterson having trepidations about dinner plates and the backseats of cars on Fear Is Here. One of the “mask-wearing men” in Bloody Me is Patterson taking aim at his own characteristic Halloweeny dress too, plodding through Sleep-style sludge. It shows the success of the record in how one battles worldly hysteria with humour. And in some cases, they actually succumb to the bleakness. Small Dark Voices, the most elaborate builder, is genuinely terrifying in its claustrophobia before switching to a head-bopping drum pattern that flirts with the idea of the singer feeling fine, with some unwanted T&Cs attached.
Then again, as the album returns to reprise Bloody Me in a grainy stripped back acoustic form (as a track written before Jaye Jayle’s existence) the delicate dance between dread and fun is fully achieved. After Alter should feel like the Stetson-wearing dive bar house band recorded properly, but it’s Patterson’s liminal tales that bolster the instrumental’s menace for a thrilling descent downways, way, way below that drinking house’s basement.
For fans of: The Veils, Chelsea Wolfe, Oxbow
‘After Alter’ by Jaye Jayle is out now on Pelagic Records.
Words by Elliot Burr
