Jungle (Jungle album)

Jungle is the debut studio album by

On release, the album received generally favourable reviews from

Formed in 2013, the identities of Jungle's were originally kept secret, in order to place an aesthetic emphasis on the music's surrounding artwork and videos. Instead, the duo of Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland identified as J and T, respectively.[4] The pair had revealed their true names by the release of Jungle.^[5]

"Platoon" and "The Heat" were digitally released as the

A music video for the fourth single, "Time", was released on 8 July 2014.[17] On 8 September, remixes of the song by Joe Goddard and LXURY were released onto iTunes.^[18][19]

Composition

Jungle has been described as an album of

"The Heat", a "falsetto space funk" song,[22] combines mentions of temperature and sexual 'heat' with the sampled police siren to feature "three separate 'heat' references in under 10 seconds."^[20] "Accelerate" features flourishes of chillwave,^[1] and has been described as containing "Tears for Fears-go-tropical undulations".^[24] "Drops" combines the creaking door sounds with a "minimal, James Blake-esque" sound.^[1][25] "Time" has a funk bassline reminiscent of Parliament,^[1] while the noir-esque^[2] "Smoking Pixels" is the record's sole instrumental.^[1] "Julia" is an 1980s-style synth-pop song.^[25]

Critical reception

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
AnyDecentMusic?	7.1/10[26]
Metacritic	72/100[27]
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[25]
The A.V. Club	B−[1]
The Guardian	[28]
The Independent	[24]
The Irish Times	[21]
Mojo	[29]
NME	8/10[22]
The Observer	[2]
Pitchfork	6.2/10[20]
Uncut	6/10[30]

Upon its release, Jungle received positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 72, based on 21 reviews.^[27]

For AllMusic, Fred Thomas wrote that Jungle is "to be taken as a complete statement, and one that seems to reveal its nuances with repeat listens", adding that the identities and backgrounds of the band members "quickly become extraneous in light of the wealth of intriguing sounds presented on this incredibly well-constructed debut."^[25] Jim Carroll of The Irish Times believed it to be a record of "future-funk party favourites" that works well on repeat, praising the album's sunny pop grooves and noting: "When the sounds are this vibrant, it doesn't matter a jot who the Junglists actually are". He also highlighted the "intriguing darker side" to some of the songs, informed by the duo's inner-city lives.^[21]

Mark Beaumont of

In The Guardian, Paul MacInnes felt that the songs work individually, but that the whole album becomes predictable, adding that "the faint, faded vocals, which at first intrigued – are they those of a wounded lover, or just a jaded observer? – now sound affected", and concluding that, "by deliberately creating a sense of mystery around themselves, Jungle may have raised expectations that their music cannot yet deliver on."^[28] Nick Coleman of The Independent similarly argued that the duo "should have cultivated the mystique some more, because their heat-haze hybrid of soul grooves and falsetto-funk chic feels too under-cooked to sustain a whole album", noting that much of the record "dissolves into a vague dissolves into a vague chill-out-zone drift". However, he praised songs such as "Busy Earnin'" and "Accelerate" for engagingly combing "summery uplift with a reflective tug".^[24]

Andy Beta of Pitchfork considered Jungle to work better as individual singles than an entire album, considering the "shimmering surface" to "belie the flimsiness of the songs themselves, which buckle under any sort of weight". He also noted that the group's "falsetto-castrato harmonies—just beyond the range of Pharrell—that deliver each chorus and hook" prove tiring, making the album feel longer than its 39-minute length.^[20] Josh Terry of The A.V. Club wrote that the album is competent and contains great singles, but added that besides "a smattering of strong tracks", the record is ultimately "too sleek and too wrapped in its own crate-digging influences to be more than an agreeable summer album."^[1]

Track listing

Personnel

Charts

References