Jill Lorean Peace Cult

On debut album This Rock Jill Lorean captured her musical sketches in a three-day burst of inspiration – mics hung from the ceiling, cracks showing, a document of that exact time and place. It’s follow-up, the sprawling Peace Cult, finds the same trio of Jill Lorean, Andy Monaghan (Frightened Rabbit) and Pete Kelly working with far more space and control, Jill’s fragmented ideas brought together over time, with very deliberate care and attention, with a generous focus on the finer details.

Formed of eleven new songs, Peace Cult is once again released via Monohands Records, and it makes for a bold new step in Jill Lorean’s career, one that has seen her develop from early success with her band Sparrow & The Workshop, through various projects including Three Queens In Mourning (with Alex Nielsen and Alisdair Roberts), Scottish collective Hen Hoose, as well as a rich body of theatre and soundtrack work.

Front and centre of the new work is the burgeoning relationship on Jill Lorean as a trio, rather than the solo project that the name suggests. Monaghan especially was involved from the outset of the work, both he and Pete Kelly infusing Jill’s sketches with vivid ideas of their own. The result is an expansion of the previous palette, a rousing concoction of piano, synth, harmonica, bowed guitars, and more, pieces of a puzzle that see the ideas explored on This Rock find new shapes and colours all of their own.

That being said, there’s also a deep-seated sense of restraint that ripples throughout Peace Cult - not just as an ambiguous feeling to the work, but also both pronounced and deliberate. “We took a step back and there were a few things I did that were different this time around,” Jill says of the new album. “I wanted to sit back a little and not scream so much. I wanted to sing with more control, so whenever I felt like I wanted to push my voice out, I found a way to hold it back.”

Peace Cult feels like being in the heart of a journey, rather than at the end of one looking back, and it’s that unsteadiness that makes it such a varied and interesting listen. “It is good to have an end to journey toward,” as Ursula Le Guin writes in the aforementioned novel, “but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”