Petrichor, that lovely smell that accompanies the first rain after a long dry spell, is a once-obscure word everybody now seems to know. And it’s the perfect term to conjure the gentle refresh-and-release of Amber Bain’s second album as The Japanese House. Backed by soft sprinkles of guitar, splooshy dollops of synth and suffused with hazy poetry, In the End It Always Does is a deliciously fragrant affair.
While her 2019 debut album, Good at Falling, tracked the tumultuous arc of a love affair, In the End It Always Does offers more scattered, diaristic meditations on the way identity shifts and drifts, as romantic relationships drift into friendships or separations. She’s described one track – “One for Sorrow Two For Joni Jones” featuring Katie Gavin from MUNA – as “a sort of ode to that feeling when Emma Thompson stands there and cries when she’s holding the CD in Love Actually”. Yet the delicate impressionism of Bain’s lyrics are a world away from the sledgehammer sentimentality of that film. Over the felt-hammer ripple of a piano and the swell of an accordion, Bain sings: “Maybe I want to be free/ Maybe I don’t, subconsciously…”
