Jess Ball, Lost On Me → Song Review

[otw_shortcode_dropcap label=”C” size=”large” border_color_class=”otw-no-border-color” shadow=”shadow” square=”square”]lub records have long served as a training ground for pop singers, a place to learn how a hook behaves at volume and how little a vocal needs to do to carry a room. Jess Ball spent the best part of a decade there, the voice on tracks by EDX, NERVO, Curbi and Dash Berlin, clocking up over 200 million streams while mostly appearing in small print under somebody else’s name.

Two years into a solo career, and newly settled in London, she has turned that schooling inward. ‘Lost On Me’ was made with Antoni Polimeni and Richy Sebastian of 1and2 Productions, the duo her high school music teacher first introduced her to; their debut collaboration, EDX’s “I Found You (Neptune)”, went on to top Beatport. Reuniting the same team to write about the years when they first met gives the record a pleasing circularity.

The arrangement is clean and unhurried: soft synth chords, a steady midtempo pulse, plenty of air around the vocal. Ball sings plainly, without the melisma her peers lean on, and the restraint suits a lyric about the Melbourne friends and family who formed her. Notably, she resists self pity. This is gratitude, not mourning, closer in spirit to Olivia Dean’s warmth than to the gloom of Cigarettes After Sex, another name on her list of heroes.

The video, stitched together from her parents’ camcorder tapes, joins a long line of artists raiding the family archive. It works for the reason those films always do: nobody on screen knew anyone but Dad would ever see it.

A modest record, then, but one made by someone who understands the difference between missing a place and wanting to go back.

You can take a listen to ‘Lost On Me‘ by Jess Ball here. 

Four out of five – George James. 

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