You know that feeling you experience while you’re in the queue to buy popcorn for the long-awaited sequel to one of your favourite films of all time? That cocktail of expectation and the fear of disappointment (after all, how could Indiana Jones possibly be any good 20 years later?) and the sense that you really ought not to get your hopes too high? It is into this sort of climate which Richie Egan’s third outing as Jape is being released. To plough along with the Indy metaphor, Ritual has been in developmental hell since his last release, and whether it would ever be eventually released began to be seriously doubted. More worryingly, how irrelevant would it be when it finally did become available? Thankfully, while the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a “quite all right, really” movie, Ritual is an album worth waiting another 10 years for.
Opening with a trance-like sample on Christopher & Anthony, ending with the DJ-Shadow evoking track Nothing Lasts Forever, the album moves through new wave, eighties synthpop, kraut-electro, folk, house and rap without once sounding unfocussed or achingly contrived. By placing a thoroughly Irish storytelling skew (mentions of Jackie’s Army and a skanger-accented Crumlin remind you Jape’s still Richie from the block) in juxtaposition with genres that might as well not exist in the country we are gifted with one of our few truly internationally appealing albums. Correction: universally appealing. For it is the thematic banquet laid out here that is most impressive. Graveyard sees a nostalgically saturated confession of kissing in cemeteries turn to a philosophical confrontation of mortality and the importance of achievement. Phil Lynott, originally a comical interlude in his live show, sees Egan deal with ambition in a fabulist format. And he can still pull off lines like “I popped my cherry to November Rain/I think she liked it but don’t think she came” as if he’s your best mate giving you a sly wink across a pub table.
There is nothing throwaway about the “obvious” singles, and nothing unmemorable about the album tracks. Only Apple In An Orchard feels like a replay of earlier ideas, but is pulled off with enough aplomb to make it viable. Egan boasts an adeptness with whatever he turns his hand to. Dynamics, melody, philosophy and expression are all present on what is a collection of masterfully-written songs that may well replace Heartworm, I Am The Greatest or Isn’t Anything atop the connoisseurs left-field Irish albums chart. What is most impressive is that it feels like Jape might still have his Loveless in him.
