Jam City: Jam City Presents EFM Album Review

7.4

By Eric Torres

Genre:

Electronic

Label:

Earthly

Reviewed:

June 7, 2023

Jam City's debut album, 2012's Classical Curves, rewired grime textures and electro-funk chords through sleek, off-kilter sound design and blistering rhythms. The English electronic producer born Jack Latham cited both Philly club and Laurie Anderson—indicators of his omnivorous, high-concept style from the start. In the decade since releasing the album, a keystone of London's influential Night Slugs label, he's contributed writing and production to a new class of pop stars (Olivia Rodrigo, Troye Sivan), electronic experimentalists (Kelela), and genre-blurring rappers (Lil Yachty) with equal flexibility. On his latest album, Jam City Presents EFM, Latham returns with an effervescent blend of rattling garage, glitzy disco, and thumping house. The guiding principle behind the album, the best Jam City LP to date, is simple: getting blasted at your favorite club with familiar faces, "looking for fun and hedonism and all that good stuff," as he put it in a recent interview. (He has said that "EFM" is short for, among other things, "Every Freak Moves" and "Endless Fantasy Music.")

Latham's tactile production is key to EFM's spell. A pan flute darts through opener "Touch Me," giving the song a bright, playful rush that matches lyrics about an intoxicating lover's healing touch. Latham sounds similarly buoyant throughout: His hooks are uniformly euphoric, and the guest artists meet his uptempo energy. On the shimmering standout "Wild N Sweet," Empress Of is a perfect foil for Latham's bright keys and delirious chorus, her voice warped into light-headed, oscillating ribbons over throbbing bass. Latham's chosen features complement his smooth sound well. South West London singer Aidan sings on multiple songs, finding an especially supple groove on "Do It" over a slinky guitar melody and an assertive, chopped-up vocal sample lifted from the sexploitation classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Latham strikes an easy balance between straight-ahead club tracks and blissed-out pop exercises, and pleasures that could be fleeting linger into the next song.

Some of EFM's most memorable tracks unearth a deeper melancholy within Latham's percussive, chest-rattling textures. "LLTB" submerges a yearning piano melody beneath crashing garage drums; topped with Kelly Zutrau's gentle vocals, it brings to mind the bleary-eyed haziness that hits at the club in the early hours of the morning. He achieves the same effect on a few of EFM's harder tracks: The insistent, rubbery beat that powers "Reface" bursts open into a sunshower of airy synth squiggles at its climax, while "Times Square" finds a sweet spot over a bounding Omar S sample and joyful, surging melodies. The back-and-forth between exuberance and spiraling angst—best typified by "Tears at Midnight," an impressionistic, swaying power ballad—gives the album tension, deftly switching between modes.

The palpable sense of delight that radiates across EFM feels like a distillation of Latham's sharply honed instincts as a producer. He's fully in control here, even when he delivers a curveball like "Redd St. Turbulence," an agitated late-album highlight on which he teams up with hardcore band Show Me the Body's Julian Cashwan-Pratt. The singer's mumbled vocals give way to agitated snarls, like a careening update of a Prodigy song, while Latham unleashes rapid-fire, rave-ready drums. Like EFM's best songs, it's a jolt of energy that cuts bone deep.