julie - my anti-aircraft friend Review
Mysterious, magnetic, mercurial, Julie’s debut is the triumphant love-child of alt-rock and shoegaze.
Is there any artist operating today that you simply can’t get to know online? It’s easier than ever to know what kind of cereal they eat in the wee hours of the day, or what their coffee order is. The prolific over-sharing that encourages parasocial connection and, ultimately, most importantly, the monetary investment in musicians is pushed as a PR tactic more and more in today’s digital world. Not, however, for Julie. Who? No, not a middle-aged woman, Julie are a shoegaze trio from Los Angeles signed to Atlantic Records. And they’re aloof, cool, chronically off-line. No TikToks in sight. Vast expanses of time stretch between releases. On their debut album, Julie prove that in the tenebrous depths behind the closed doors they’ve been hiding frustratingly behind, something delicious has been cooking.
On their debut album ‘my anti-aircraft friend’, Julie offer ten songs that capture the fragments of a moody longing that is simultaneously universal and unknowable in its experiential singularity. As if in frustration at this paradox, often the guitar and the vocals push and pull at each other, often a rogue flourishes with the hi-hat take you by surprise, often shoegaze and alt-rock lock arms in some pseudo-fight-cum-embrace and out clambers a new, magnetic sound.
The album’s highlight is surely when ‘very little effort’ slides into ‘my clairbourne practice’, and the voices of both Keyan Pourzand and Alex Brady mix warmly together, one angelic and sweet, the other almost sardonic in its flippancy. Their chemistry is carefully curated, and teasing silences often scatter throughout the album that works to highlight the tightness of their sound. After this, ‘knob’ shows an impressively mature and Edgar Allen-Poe-esque lamentation to a lost lover: “I took too long and you gave it away /Couldn't start from here / You're pleading away /It just makes you lose / All the crows showin' teeth.” 90s alt-rock fester like a tapeworm in the guts of their sound.
Later, in ‘thread, stitch’, Julie use the stop-start swing of knitting something together to workshop a groggy dragging sound with groaning guitars slipping in and out of tune. Whilst this song is less popular, more experimental with the tools of the genre, the band then slip into ‘feminine adornments’ with Alex’s crisp, clear vocals pulling the listener back in, crooning like the crows still bearing teeth. Their dual placement shows a creative democracy that is particularly refreshing; “we would rather have no representation rather than be misrepresented,” drummer Dillon Lee stated. The final track, ‘stuck in a car with angels’, rings out with the culmination of the mercurial magnetism bubbling beneath the surface of every track.
The coherency of their sound means that, sometimes, one song might slip into an other and suddenly the vinyl clicks into the edge of white noise before you know forty minutes have passed. But what they do nail, they nail perfectly. In this way, Julie are like an ex-partner, whose whining voice notes you return to in stupefied drunken moments, to regurgitate the fire that once rocked your ribcage. The voice notes may all sound the same, but they get you like no one else can. Only, your ex is a thing of the past. Julie is here to stay, and the future might just have their name on it.