The Irrepressibles - Yo Homo (2024) Hi-Res

Jaimie Irrepressible has a new album for you to enjoy over cocktails and fine wine. Straight talking but not necessarily Straight Talking it has designs on your attention. MK Bennett surrenders to its will.

Gay culture in this country has always required a sort of surrender to the greater culture itself. From the 1940s until yesterday, some poor souls have been closeting themselves because a middle-aged man is telling them it will hurt the fanbase. Despite the evolution of attitudes towards what is nobody else’s business, some still find other’s private time something to be discussed over the morning cornflakes. There is an invisible contract, a line not to be crossed, a Larry Graysonism that must be followed. Ask anybody who saw Lily Savage onstage during the early Pride/Mardi Gras shows, a hilarious working class scything wit that to transition to television and the Radio Times had to water down from risky to Risque. Still brilliant but not the same. They want camp. What are you offering?

The Irrepressibles are not offering camp. While the cover/title/general aesthetic may give pause to the overly sensitive, it is not dissimilar to Derek Jarman’s work of the late 70s, and in terms of expression and language, the barriers of music have long since ceased to exist. In any case, the cover is a still from the Yo Homo video, directed by activist and artist Joseph Wilson. The Irrepressibles are one man, Jamie, producer, writer, and singer of golden song. Four albums in Jamie is laser-focused on his mission, which might be as simple as to be taken as an equal to his straighter or less forward peers. The album proves the man has an outrageous talent not limited in any way to a particular style or genre. As a rule, this means an artist utilising their influences to express the importance of their message.

Yo Homo kicks off with Will You? and despite his previous excellence with a string section, it is immediately obvious that this is a deeply modern and up to date rock, pop, RnB album, reminiscent of Teddy Swims, Rag N Bone Man, big lads with broken hearts and the voice to make you empathise. Lyrically, it is a song of lust and the first attraction, the topic of teenage pop forever and a day. The instrumentation is beautiful and subtle, strings coil in and out of the riffs, sweet aromas and sour tastes change with the atmosphere, and like a few of the songs here, not dissimilar to the clipped rhythms of the poppier Nirvana songs. So? Is the sound of Elbow condensing a Shakespearean tragedy into a four-minute French Chanson It is very dramatic and batshit wonderful.

The Desert, an instrumental with some slight Arabic strings, has a gorgeous arrangement and works well in its travelling soundtrack way However, there is a percentage of you waiting for the vocal to start, and so it works better on repeated listens because you know that won’t happen. A breather too, a pause at least from the amassed emotion. Raise My Soul is a narrative from stage to lover, lover to stage. The excellent use of the drums as percussive, not just beats, and the stop /start dynamics coupled with the double-time chorus make this a bit of a masterclass. It ends with a high, clear harmony, just because.

Two Hearts starts like 50s Rock & Roll of the innocent kind, the sort of pure, virginal thing Tarantino would use in a Diner scene to indicate the purity of it, A la Ricky Nelson or Duane Eddy. Even the whistling is perfectly in context. Wonderful authentic strings again, it’s only in the snarled Elvis lip of its delivery you start to see the heartbreak in the words. However explicitly gendered those words might be, it takes less than an incremental shift in your thinking to empathise and relate them to yourself. Common humanity might only need a touch of common brilliance to bond it, something like “But the dark came tumbling down made me look like a clown but he could see sincerity in my desire”. Be Wild is a weird piece, sat mid-album but sounding like a big intro (or Outro) for a gig, a 90s grunge bassline that slinks across the song as Jamie repeats the same refrain over and over before giving up the words altogether.

Yo Homo itself is a 21st Century protest song, a demand to be heard and to be allowed to move freely. It’s catchy enough with a slightly metal descending line into the chorus, but all rock too, similar to Skunk Anansie or Placebo, with the discordant note at the chorus end reminding you it’s still not plain sailing. A turning point in the album too, which changes slightly lyrically to become more about hard won love and hard sex and vice versa. In The Rhythm sticks with the consistency already achieved musically, the Pixies/Nirvana quiet verse loud chorus arrangement that works especially well here, as the chorus fair explodes into life, that ennui laced voice comes to life to explain the narrative clearly. Think of it as an updated Grace Jones.

It was probably less bravery and more necessity that made him come this far out of the trenches while maintaining a line to the mainstream. He could have easily kept the pronouns neutral like so very many before him, but the constant use of he and him here is clearly specific and with reason. It is a sword, a light sabre, a message in the dark and not the least of it; it is the man’s truth. Still, no matter how righteous the agenda, you better have the songs, too.

Connection starts with a voice and no instruments before a Fever style rhythmic dance between the two, another fantastic bit of inventive rock that has a massive hook-laden chorus and urgent lyrics. Destination is a Gotye-style moody rocker with an excellent lyric and a plea to be seen as more than temporary. The loneliness in the line “I aimlessly move from one day to the next with isolation my agency” is profound and apparent but is disguised well by this, the more poppy of the songs so far.

Finally, Ecstacy Homosexuality brings us to a close, six minutes of wonder, starting like a Jeff Buckley funeral march before its elegiac movement forward, the cellos hang like dress suits, the violins hum. It is nothing less than a love song to homosexual desire, to desire itself.

For all the real and imagined politics, for the considerable weight of history, the agony and the ecstasy, in the end, all this beauty proves is that the pronouns may change, but the song remains the same. Strip everything away, and it is the beauty that stays.