Album Review Just Mustard - Heart Under

The gestation period for Just Mustard’s second full-length was arduous and winding. The self-produced ‘Heart Under’ was subject to meticulous tweaks and re-recordings - across the space of a year in fact - before reaching its current form. Swampy and tumultuous like a month’s worth of rain, the Dundalk five-piece have spared no expense in creating immersive, cavernous spaces of shoegazing, post-punk splendour. ‘I Am You’’s nightmarish beauty, the near perfect stillness of ‘Blue Chalk’, or the crash-bang gushes of ‘In Shade’ stand out as among the album’s finest examples of Just Mustard’s mastery of tension and time. Haunted throughout by screeching guitars - sounding as much like screaming underground trains as guitars - sinewy basslines and stony drum textures, cutting divinely though it all are Katie Ball’s intimate vocal displays. Her sky-searing voice, matched with a seductively elliptic lyrical bite, offers a blinking light of human purity within such guttural and grimacing industrial soundscapes. Honing the epic of ‘Disintegration’-era Cure, during the Bloodiest of Valentines ‘Heart Under’ snugs right into that stream of dissonant rock currently emerging from the Emerald Isle - Gilla Band and tour buddies Fontaines DC among them. And isn’t the world a better place for it?