Audiopile Review: Finally have enough stock of this 2024 standout to get it into the weekly email, the demand for it always outweighing the amount of copies we could secure. If you’re just hearing their name for the first time, you’d be forgiven, the Bristol-based trio have been slipping under the radar with a series of low-key releases of their dazed and diffused ethereal pop strewn about various micro labels, long gaps between full lengths, small-run collabs and unwieldy formats. They’ve been a well-kept secret for a bit, needless to say, but A Soft and Gatherable Star finally moves the needle. Being from Bristol is a bit of a giveaway for their headspace, the soft touch of trip-hop and the nocturnal post-rock tracings of the city are threaded throughout, but they’re also part of the dream pop continuum that’s been rippling outwards the past several years. An absolute shoo-in for fans of Maria Somerville’s recent LP on 4AD, a label that easily could have released this back in their heyday.

Bristol trio Jabu return with their third album ‘A Soft and Gatherable Star’.
The album takes its name from a poem written by Childs’ father, another of his poems, which forms the backbone of ‘Ashes Over Shute Shelve’ hangs on the wall in the studio.
‘It feels like there’s a lot of hope in it in a way, even though I always read it as a poem about death (and I think it was about his approaching death) there’s something beautiful in it, seeing it as a chance to see things from a new perspective rather than something to be afraid of.’

The album feels like a meshing into a kind of group think for the band, allowing influences to bleed together and allowing songs to exist as they appear – rather than trying to shape or mould them.
There are echos of early influences bleeding through too, Rendall remembers tapes of Luther Vandross in the car with his mum – you can hear the ghosts of those straight-to-the-heart vocals, but everything extraneous has been stripped away, leaving just voice, feedback and guitar.
‘We came to this album in a bit of a different way than the previous ones, it naturally came to a place where we were all playing instruments together, none of us are really proficient musicians or anything but we enjoyed working like that, bouncing ideas off each other in a more immediate way’
Recorded between Bristol and Childs’ Mum’s house just outside the city, the album feels like a dreamlike exploration of time and place, lost teenage memories pushing their way back, or a non descript landmark looming suddenly large.
‘…being alone in the dark in these patchwork areas of nature in the city, they feel like they transform into something else at night. Sometimes on long nights like these, the morning comes and it feels like something’s changed and can’t go back.’