Perhaps by virtue of the mononym, Jungle only sounds like one place to me. But Sylvan Esso has two words—thus, two places: southern China and North Carolina.
The band’s first record, this self-titled album, takes me back to our little apartment in a Chinese city most people can’t find on a map, where my partner and I would spend long evenings cooking on an induction plate, the kitchen filling with steam and the faint scent of noodles boiling or dumplings frying. I can still smell the volatile aldehydes of rice cooking in my mind’s… nose?
We were one of a few people in the unfinished twelve-story building, so we didn’t have to worry too much about being excessively loud. I had developed a ritual which I still follow today for more intense cooking sessions. It goes like this: I select an album I haven’t listened to and do food prep, cook, and eat to it. Usually, the objective is to cycle through different artists, different works, but this record stuck like fried food to the unseasoned wok.
Initially, we found Sylvan Esso through an NPR feature on summertime songs, the singsong melodies of tracks like “Hey Mami” floating through the kitchen as I prepped dinner, almost playful but edged with something lustful and raw. We had just finished listening through most of David Bowie’s discography (Ziggy, of course, being a favorite revisit) and was searching for something more contemporary to change things up, something that could bridge the rawness of folk music with the clean, synthetic pull of electronic production. Amelia Meath’s voice had this hypnotic, lullaby quality, while Nick Sanborn’s beats built a kind of tension, like the hum of cicadas on a hot night or the spontaneous torrential downpour in the oversaturated southern summer—China or Carolina.
When we came back to the States, the record carried with it the weight of memory, yet it felt equally fit in the pines and red clay that would come to be our home. We would move to Carolina so my partner could attend graduate school, not realizing that it was a musical hub for so many artists in Bon Iver’s orbit, including Sylvan Esso. I would eventually run into them at a local grocery store a couple of times, starstruck in the same way that I’m sure the villagers were of me when I shopped at the market, surprised to see someone of international renown in your small town.
But I can promise you I didn’t hand Nick or Amelia my baby as a photo prop, like a person at the market did for me.
Verdict: Keep
What album has crossed the ocean with you?