Jay Marie, Comfort Me (Vinyl LP)

Mess Esque is an Australian duo who sound like they literally dreamed themselves into being, and might even still be in the dream that made them! Helen Franzmann (McKisko) and Mick Turner (Dirty Three, Tren Brothers) initially partnered on Mess Esque’s shared inner plane circa 2020. Since then, they’ve taken their preferred path — the one less traveled — at an unhurried pace. Yet Jay Marie, Comfort Me is their third album in less than five years, and the new music feels a hemisphere away from their first efforts: a whole new atmospheric level above, with greater depths to descend into as well. All hail the dreamers — they travel in abstract shapes that the rest of us don’t even know how to imagine.

Mess Esque first launched as a correspondence course. The two swapped tracks between Melbourne and Brisbane, experimentally pairing Mick’s guitar, keys and loops with Helen’s ruminative vocals, in search of a dance floor hit. It was in vain; they didn’t chart there. But the relationship of their sounds immediately clicked, and they wrote songs and songs — all without ever meeting face to face! — leaving the equivalent of a ghostly fingerprint on the production lens, with warm beams of music glowing through. They released Dream #12 through Australian label Bedroom Suck in April 2021, with a self-titled album on Drag City following six months later. Then it was time to actualize in the same spaces for some touring: Australia, the US, UK, Europe, and New Zealand. It was a whole different way of hearing and seeing for Mess Esque, bound to affect the approach for their junior album, yeah?

But no, instead of getting themselves together in one room and rocking it to high heavens, Mick and Helen retreated to their safe distances, some 800 miles apart, and continued the absentee ballet as before. The exquisite corpse-style songwriting seems to suit ‘em! And us too. And wait, what’s this? Jay Marie, Comfort Me has an edge to it: that savage grace that comes from actually drawing breath and stepping up in the witness of others. Rocking, we daresay — nothing else to call songs like Crow’s Ash Tree and Take Me To Your Infinite Garden, wow! — without ever losing the sweet ramble of their inception. The process of becoming, in all its aspects, has made Mess Esque’s efforts ever more visceral and incisive, their music billowing up to the skies while drawing close to the bone in the same moment.

Jay Marie, Comfort Me is co-produced by Helen and Mick themselves, along with Nick Huggins, who recorded the Dirty Three’s acclaimed Love Changes Everything, Mick’s Don’t Tell the Driver, and McKisko’s Southerly album. Along with Keeley Young and Kishore Ryan from the live band, the album features cellist Stephanie Arnold and a couple of Australia’s living legends of percussion: Bree van Reyk (whose 2022 album Superclusters is a beautiful monster!) and Mick’s ol’ Dirty Three partner in crime, Jim White.

The title — Jay Marie, Comfort Me — is from a line in the song, That Chair. That’s Helen’s sister in there. She died in her sleep unexpectedly last year. It feels right to have her name on the jacket.

Jay Marie, Comfort Me reaches exciting new heights in the Mess Esque journey, propelling their uniquely twisted aural circus to a new level of dance-ability, exaltation and effect. Fitting the immediacy at their core with new dimensions, Mess Esque push themselves — and therefore, us — into more vivid states of being.

Tracklist:

1. Light Showroom
2. Take Me To Your Infinite Garden
3. Liminal Space
4. That Chair
5. Crow's Ash Tree
6. Let Me Know You
7. Armour Your Amor
8. No Snow