Kyle Jenkins

Love Lost Love

Near Enough Records

Kyle Jenkins, the prolific songwriter and frontman for Toowoomba alt-country band Suicide Swans, has also found the time to release his second solo album. His debut, Meltdown, shared a lot of similarities with Suicide Swans but on Love, Lost Love, things get darker and starker.

Predominately acoustic in nature (plus some atmospheric synths), this is a long deep dive into Jenkins’ songwriting. Think Van Zandt, Dylan and Ryan Adams. It’s a long album too – running to 15 songs and clocking in at 110 minutes, essentially making it a double album. Impressively, there’s also a second companion album due this year. When you consider his description of it being “moments of isolation, destruction, hope that is housed in the finality of loss of relationships,” the going can be heavy at times, when consumed in a single sitting. 

Taking each song on its own merit, there’s little to fault as Jenkins has a seemingly endless well of country/folk melodies and wordplay at his disposal. His voice is the perfect vehicle for conveying pain, sorrow, regret and disdain and musically he understands the balancing act of ‘less is more’. When things get more rousing (‘All Remains’, ‘Rosey Red Day’, ‘Burn Brightly’) there’s a clear affinity with the raw folk ragas of The Felice Brothers. 

At its core this is a deeply personal album and one that sounds timeless due to its emotional resonance and world class songwriting.

Chris Familton