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vawsculturecorner · 11 months ago

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sideFX: Fragments of Self Reflection, Appraisals in Broken Mirrors

On the final track of sideFX, JSV opens his verse with the following:

“Pauly said “My bro you start rapping better”

As you press play and immerse yourself in his brutal portrayal of society languished, it's difficult not to wholeheartedly agree.

That's not to say that this is the first notable release from Liverpool's JSV. The last 15 months have seen a smattering of quality releases, spanning from the single 'INERTIA' featuring the aforementioned boycottpauly, 2022’s 'SAVE ME' single, and this year's RELAPSE SESSIONS project. This is far from JSV’s first rodeo when it comes to releasing quality music - tracks like 'Freddie Gibbs' are worth a spin for those with a penchant for icy, tough-as-nails trap and hip-hop in the vein of Shadow of a Doubt by the track’s namesake.

sideFX though feels like a total level up - denser lyrically, more detailed instrumentals that emphasise the grimy content, and a stronger sense of discipline, clarity and identity. In 5 tracks (just shy of 15 minutes) the audience is immersed in the city of those forgotten, brute forcing through a life fraught with fiends, famine, and fatigue.

Stanza 1: Content and Construction

sideFX is undeniable in its technical prowess. Whether it is writing, production, delivery or mixing, this project does not skip a beat in keeping the basics clear-cut and polished.

Major praise must be given to producer GRIEFGANG, whose project-spanning production is a seamless fit for JSV. Leering and ominous instrumentals add weight and suspense to the album's bars, giving them that extra edge and bite. They provide a powerful sense of compounding pressure, building until they burst through with strong emotional potency.

Moments like ‘Pits of Hell’ detonate tight buildups into an overwhelming sense of dread as the verse intoxicates with unfurling frenzy. The transition from the previous ‘Gift of The Gab’ into this track feels like a proper ‘mask off’ moment and is an immensely satisfying musical payoff. Working with one producer adds a layer of cohesion that allows the project to transcend the sum of its parts, and results in an elevated and holistic listening experience.

By the same token, if you have been digging for more cold-blooded, pulls-no-punches rapping, you can find it here in spades. Look no further than the opener 'Gut Feeling' - the bars are strong and direct, with hard syllables and harder lines.

“Have a puff, don’t worry what I put inside the blunt

Pfizer bars and cypher bars, it don’t matter, I eat em up”

JSV opens the verse by “packing it up”, starting at the close of a relationship exhausted. This double entendre relates the toxicity of drug addiction to the toxicity of a failing relationship, trying to distance himself and resist the urge to “hit just one more time”. A recurring bell toll paces the track; time is up, and he knows it. Tonally, it also establishes what JSV is all about - getting his bag on his own terms, in his own lane.

“I just mind my business, been up in around a bin or two

I don’t got no business where I beam on road at 3 or 2”

This is supplemented by an excellent and encrypted verse from boycottpauly; it's clear in speaking to him that hours could be dedicated to breaking it down line-by-line. It carries its own set of Easter Eggs and pop culture references - the respectful nod to Kylie Minogue’s Fever doubling as a reference to his own track ‘Fever Dream’ from REDHOT Vol.1. Following the lead with his own set of clever bars, he wears his idiosyncrasies and high-speed lifestyle on his sleeve, regardless of the consequences.

“They only come around when I’m up, fuck I’m supposed to think?

I’m curving more cunts each day it’s exponential”

Seconding the feelings of mental unrest, he intertwines attempts to find his footing with the duo’s geographical and cultural placement. It reads as an assessment of where they sit amongst their country's contemporaries and adds to the record's unique sense of locality.

The following 'Gift of the Gab' features lighter production and maintains the uneasy tone of the intro, now apprehensive as if the music is in pursuit. Coupled with brief bursts of chirping synths dotting the instrumental foreground, JSV travels this beat with ease. He treats it like comp reps, sounding familiar and consistently focused as he floats through a verse.

Culminating with that incredibly satisfying transition mentioned previously, the instrumental is constructed beautifully and strengthens the sensory punch of the following 'Pits of Hell'. The atmosphere is oppressive and overwhelming; the delivery sounds infected with an uncontrollable fury being brutally staved off. His voice is deeper and more deliberate; solemn spitting rather than confident bravado. The atmosphere is so oppressive, it's palpable - fuzzed-out guitar licks provide a hazy, static coating for blunt hits of percussion. Clever wordplay and references remain, with bars about lashing out on opps like a kill streak on Halo.

“Still I’ll put halos on seven they heads and i'm calling it kilimanjaro”

Bars like the above that are more fun are no less fluent and unflinching. At this point, we are given the project’s second feature - a devilish verse from indigomerkaba laced with wild and manic outbursts where mental hell breaks loose. Whether he’s echoing the themes of stagnancy and time slipping away as he sits “wigging out at the clock turning”, or exhibiting genuinely demonic behaviour as his “tongue flicker(s) like i'm shard craving”, his rapping is so sharp and vivid you can hear it drawing blood.

The following 'Snakeskin' settles the turbulence and keeps it more low-key, complimenting a reflective and introspective JSV. Rotating through once-present figures, the wear and tear of distance reinforce decisions of solitude and self-medication as tragic chords texture the gravitas hanging beneath his hard exterior.

“Feel the speaker bumping homie script me bricks on something

Taking steps for nothing, still I feel my mental bombing”

The closer 'Fruits of Our Labour' is, true to its name, a salient moment of presence and self-reflection as JSV measures the space between aspiration and attainment. No less clever, ingenious turns of phrase like “gronk term memory loss” punctuate headstrong self-determination and a desire to press on in the hopes of providing for him and his.

“Fucks I give are sold separately I see the call, I let it ring, forgetting what they said to me That’s gronk term memory losses Ignore the props, we cut the extras to get the profit”

These lines reveal just how tightly JSV can wind a bar. The five-word phrase “Fiends feeding off my energy” draws together three major preoccupations of the project; The devils of day-to-day life, scarcity as survival and the normalisation of an oppressive stagnation. JSV projects a self-assuredness that stands tall amongst missteps - frequent references to “fucking up” but still keeping it immaculate hammer home just how good he is even without a decade’s experience under his belt. Track like these are an obvious display of JSV’s lyrical depth, but keener analysis proves that pen pulls just as deeply in even measure.

Stanza 2: Context and Cultural Thematics

An expedition inside sideFX’s hazy desert yields a myriad of intimate reflections.

Food, Sustenance and Getting By on Nothing

Allusions to food are peppered throughout sideFX, buying more explicit leverage amongst its collection of themes. Often, the notion is less about eating and more about staying fed, taking what you can of the little available. In this sense, hunger and starvation are more prominent motifs than the concept of food itself. It becomes increasingly relevant as he explores the struggle of staying straight on a winding path and keeping bare necessities locked down.

JSV’s lyrics draw portraits of scavengers; vultures, “Dogs preying on corpses” ravaging whatever they get their hands on. People resemble monsters - mindless zombies driven solely by the need to feed. As detailed as these descriptions are, JSV retains a degree of distance from them. His delivery holds a level of intensity whilst remaining sincere in its relative acceptance and understanding. This bleeds into tracks like 'Snakeskin' as he raps about friends and foes switching places - life is a cycle, pessimism-as-realism being pushed to the absolute extreme. To excavate another salient bar;

“Used to split a ciggie with the homie after chips and gravy

5 bucks fifty, split it 6 ways, we hungry on the daily”

Singles are halved and barely enough is broken down into further fractions - chips are evenly split, and the group takes turns with smoke. The hunger is perpetual - its existence goes without saying, commentary almost unnecessary. It simply is.

By extension, keeping yourself alive holds the same daily ambivalence. Some stay fed grinding, others steal. You can eat off the plate or scavenge leftovers - when it comes down to it sustenance is sustenance. The ultimate conclusion is that there is little room for big dreams and stadium aspirations; in the end, you simply try putting food on the table.

Maintaining Healthy Self-Criticism with a Devil on Your Shoulder

sideFX houses a strong back-and-forth between well-earned egotism and relentless self-criticism, a dynamic that appears painfully authentic and difficult to bear. JSV establishes a dichotomy between the restraint and control that he exercises over himself and the explosive volatility that bubbles beneath the surface.

No clearer is this highlighted than in 'Pits of Hell', where indigomerkaba serves as that unflinching, flickering foil to JSV’s stone-faced emotional resilience. Frantic, sporadic and ticking, he is the voice that JSV is perpetually juggling and making attempts to contain. It invites a utilitarian form of self-assessment, a mental wound primed and re-opened for inspection:

“How’d I get like this better yet think back real deep in my fucking core

Have I ever been eets?

The ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ complex (for lack of a better analogy) is not unfamiliar; what is interesting about this depiction is its volatile balancing act. Both are tools of living - sometimes your cunning keeps you alive and other times it's owed to your drives and hunger. Each pulls you to their side and ways of seeing as you try to select the appropriate methodology needed in the moment. These schemas of the philosopher and survivalist are in constant flux, conceptualising both aptitudes as requirements of a harsh world that passes no judgment on your place inside it. You are dependent on both that tough physicality and rational self-assessment to live.

“And I get real cold but I still wanna see you call

I can rush to answer

Rinse repeat now holes in the fucking doors

Don’t wanna admit but I start to see with time I’m the fucking cause”

In-kind, his approach to conflict is measured, only exerting the force necessary to proceed. It's empirical and impersonal - the consequence of acting up is self-affliction as energy is stored to be used solely when required. If anything happens to you, it's squarely because you found yourself in the way.

“Tell a gronk meet death on your own accord”

Self-assessments are never clean-cut and prone to bias from natural impulses. They are founded on emotions - anger, resentment, longing, love - all blending in with one another. There isn’t a clean edge to separately frame all the things that make you what you are; you stare into a broken mirror, and with the cracked fragments you try to piece together something recognisable.

Time’s Up: Burning up as You Walk Through Hell

Hellish and demonic illustrations blaze the brushstrokes of JSV’s verbal easel. You can even see it in the track titles - “Pits of Hell'' and “Snakeskin” are two more obvious examples. These are supplemented with portraits of illness and famine - the world JSV walks is infected with a fiendish sickness as it wastes away.

The diseased and demonic detailing is hardly set-dressing - it serves as a frame of reference for the world surrounding it. Life is hell more often than it is not, and travelling the paths that he has does not make this any less true. In such a gruelling world, cruelty is overcome by taking what you can and running with it.

Boycottpaully does exceptionally with strengthening this sentiment on the intro track. In conversation with him about this verse, he draws attention to lines like “live fast or have a slow demise” and how they reinforce the idea of “playing the hand you’re dealt”. This lifestyle is one of the few available options - when the alternative is waiting for the tide to pull you under, you “take what’s in front of you and you run with it”.

By extension, the parallels to Breaking Bad’s Walter White dwell deeper than surface-level references. Both come face to face with the allure of reckless self-service and have had to learn to sustain themselves rather than succumb to it. It leads back to that same fundamental need - stay fed and keep moving.

“Act like we don’t know you, gave em shoulders that were cold as ice

Bro the one who knocks, he got a couple points off Walter white

Behold the sight, I told no lie, I’m taking no advice

You could live a fast life or have a slow demise”

Again, it's less about food than it is about famine. JSV’s hell is, for all its torments, sparse. Rather than recounting money earned or mileage gained he dwells on that not having and what to do with that lack. This infernal imagery is an interesting allegory because it subverts the concept of hell as a place of punishment, instead establishing it as a precondition to being alive.

With famine comes disease - a communal sickness, gingerly lifting those too tired to carry on and syphoning their life force to depletion. People become zombies; “sunken faces” aimless beyond their primal instinct to eat. They feast with an insatiable frenzy when and where they can because, despite their best efforts, they will never be fed. We aren’t falling into the pit of hell really - the dirt walls of our captivity are erected around us. It’s just easier to notice when that dirt becomes a mountain.

The hell housed in his rapping is also interesting it is communal immersion. JSV has a personal connection to this hell because he is lurking in its shadiest corners, but the madness is all around us. For as much individual pain and suffering as he endures, there is a communal, joint trauma that bleeds into him.

The final lines of the album are a fantastic consolidation of themes:

"I nurture crops, the roots are bitter but strengthen the soul

Fruits of labour, pray we eat 'til the day that we old"

Self-criticism in the wake of unflinching anguish and torment is a bitter pill to swallow, but it is just physically sustainable enough to live day to day and spiritually nourishing in its provisional motivation to continue.

Stanza 3: Cultivating Greatness

This is my first attempt at a write-up of any kind - I have had no shortage of great Australian projects this year, but sideFX is ultimately what cracked that proverbial egg. Whilst this is most definitely because this project deserves to be more widely heard, I wanted to write about this project because it is intensely gratifying to sit and tussle with.

One of the record's most striking qualities is its observational eye and empathy in reckoning with intense emotions and obstacles. It's one thing to be a passive observer in a world that unfurls around you, but JSV manages to encapsulate the mechanisms of seeing itself. In a way, he captures a photograph of the artist mid-painting. Listening to someone transcend the very vices clouding them to provide a measured assessment of these vices’ effects while still respecting the inherent distortion of said assessment is both technically impressive and intimately engaging. It positions the audience very firmly inside his head and generates immense pathos - rarely do I find albums that have executed this as well as it has been here.

“Barely anyone next to me

Demons getting thе best of me

Got my head high

I try to keep it thеre, she said just give your best try

How we distant, hope we better in the next life”

Stuck in my head is that first line of 'F.O.O.L'. Perhaps it resonates so strongly because both this project and its context feel like the answer to someone (perhaps JSV himself) questioning the merit and ability of his body of work. It is evidence of an artist determined to keep their shit together and reaping the rewards of doing so.

A subtle irony in the depiction of life is its hollow lifelessness. Empowerment purely by being alive is not something subscribed to here - being alive is, at its core, only existing. This is yet another beautiful thematic pairing with his navigation of temporal stagnancy; despite the clock ticking and the sun rising/falling, you can’t shake the feeling that nothing is moving, breathing, living. The drive to press on is simply that - a drive, the final drops of petrol as you put the pedal to the metal. It is an optimistic spite that I can really get behind, a reclamation of agency and power stripped away by a socio-economic climate that would see us shit, grind and die, engaging in its whispers of quiet acceptance.

Typically, art explores our emotional peaks and pits - anger, sadness, and euphoria boiling up and intoxicating us from the inside and spurring us to action. In contrast, JSV’s writing is reserved and emotionally contained, though in a way that avoids indifference towards the suffering around him. Rather than letting it crush him he picks his head up, looks at the four feet in front of him and marches forward.

Witnessing someone so observant and seemingly overwhelmed by the hellscape they inhabit felt hauntingly familiar. Attuned to the headaches brought on by the world's oppression, this project boasts a grounded and realistic optimism that is as affirming as it is bittersweet. The social awareness is compounded by his growth as an artist on a conceptual and technical level. He isn’t saying that all this shit is going to get better - it's not his place to do so. Instead, focus is directed internally as he puts his best foot forward and climbs up that next ladder rung.

“Make the most of the cards I’m dealt and I run me the fucking ball

Young GOAT, I know that I got that flow, OG's wanna hear me more

I stepped in the scene been carving away, at a way to the top to soar

I don’t care bout shit, just wanna show mum that her son gonna get it all”

In a society increasingly apathetic towards its destruction, there is strength in using spite to persevere; spitting at the universe by living until you can no longer. Ratified by its context the music’s messaging strikes with battle-sharpened reverberation - you aren’t hearing this from someone with the money to move to Mars. It’s spoken by a regular guy in a regular neighbourhood managing the regular cruelty carried by the everyday.

Closing Stanza: A Must-Listen

If you have read this far, the blistering recommendation of this project will be far from shocking. In an environment burgeoning with some of the most promising cultural exports so-called Australia has ever seen, this project testifies that these creatives and by extension the possibilities open to them are immense, seizing the day as they take the reins into the future. Perhaps the most exciting thing about this project is that rather than a creative peak, this feels like the beginning of an incredibly impressive artist growing into the rest of his catalogue. An already high start on an upward trajectory, brimming with anticipation and potential. sideFX is the thesis statement of a wildly talented up-and-comer setting the stage and chiselling his mark in the musical landscape for the years to come.

Listen to sideFX on the streaming service of your choice HERE

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