“Where is tranquility? / Craving attention in all it’s forms / Watched you from a distance like a constant flaw / Under this certain spell / When desire is motionless”. The lyrics behind the title-track Love in Constant Spectacle showcases a deep desire that once you reach the big curtain, it comes with a certain price to be paid for. For Jane Weaver, she has reached this massive land view with her follow-up to 2021’s Flock.
The themes behind her new album details the foundation that makes us human. The stories and landscapes that it illustrates in front of our very eyes, are worth revealing beyond the silver screen. There are stronger pictures that Weaver herself envisions.
From the realms of Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, René Laloux, and the late, great Satoshi Kon, Love in Constant Spectacle is almost an imaginative art house movie that Weaver herself has unleashed to her listeners as we go inside the theatre, to give an understanding on why we go to the movies. To be free from all of the chaos that had been going on, four years ago.
This album itself is the movie that we wanted to see. Rather than the big-action pack films, the latter part of the dreaded Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the massive flops that had been going on. From the moment ‘Perfect Storm’ begins, there’s a dancing groove from the 80s synth-pop orientation with guitars, drum machine-like textures, psychedelic midsections, and Devo-sque swarms coming out of the horizons.
‘Emotional Components’ details a warm walk onto the beach with a Fripp-like guitar solo that plays into the picture while Jane gets out her classical guitar on the fourth track ‘Motif’ to take a break after the first three tracks to reveal her gentle approach to head towards the light.
‘The Axis and the Seed’ almost sounds like a late ‘60s, early ‘70s movie that came out the European Sci-Fi flicks where the New Hollywood started to gain momentum as they were taking notice of what was going outside of the system. It’s very eerie with its bass pattern, and ghostly guitar medley’s which follows Weaver’s vocal arrangements before it descends into a pool of synthesised madness.
The lullaby mellotron turned jazz waltz behind ‘Happiness in Proximity’ sees Jane not only singing the song, but doing this little dance set in a black-and-white picture in the late 1930s, early 40s, channeling the works of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers during their heyday. I felt a tug to Miles Davis’ composition ‘All Blues’ from his 1959 classic, Kind of Blue that comes to mind when I was listening to this track.
Jane channels not only the styles of Miles’ Bebop years and Bjork’s orientation, but taking a dance step to the groove before fading off into the sunset towards dreamland to a romantic bossa-nova atmosphere and ascending towards the heavens across the ‘Univers’.
Listening to ‘Family of the Sun’ which closes the album off, Jane tips her hat to a 1969 version of David Bowie during the Space Oddity-era in her own form of ‘Memory of a Free Festival’ with mournful organ arrangements, Native American powwow drum beats, and reaching the shores, knowing that Jane has accomplished her mission.
