album review: jessica paige, don’t trust me

Jessica Paige’s Don’t Trust Me opens with the arresting Garden. Well placed instrumentals, and sparse, deliberate drum-work combine with a raw vocal quality to create a track that defines good first impression.

The second album from this young artist, Don’t Trust Me cements Jessica’s status as an exciting, emerging artist. Praise from industry heavyweights such as Ben Harper, John Butler and Goyte has come her way since her first release in 2004, and it is perseverance and passion that got her through years of busking on the streets of Melbourne. Don’t Trust Me feels like a celebration of all that hard work.

The album charts the pitfalls of love. We’re there with Jessica through sadness, sheer happiness, and everything in between. Off the back of three up-tempo numbers, Only Let Me Down slows things down, pares back the melody and lets Jessica’s powerful voice shine, full of the most relatable of feelings. However, things pick up almost immediately with Golden Days, a sweetly spun yarn set to a melody that can only be described as ‘toe-tapping’. The content of the song reflects the title fully, with Jessica singing that someone makes her ‘so, so happy’.

Further down the track we have single Tired of Playing By The Rules, a slow-burning, brooding track that does exactly as it says on the packet. As Jessica sings about being finished with a relationship, we feel the exhaustion and the confusion. ‘If I’m too scared, then you’re too scary/anyway, it doesn’t matter now’, Jessica sings, sealing the fate of whoever is on the receiving end of this message.

Jessica has a lush, delicate voice that lends itself perfectly to the pure emotion present on the album. There is honesty in the lyrics and the vocals that make Jessica’s music stick out, in a world that is saturated with pretty girls and songs about love.

With this album and her haunting, lullaby of a voice, Jessica Paige establishes herself as a promising player in Australian music.