Jabu – A Soft & Gatherable Star album, track by track

Bristol shoesaze trio chat on their latest

Bristol-based outfit Jabu have been busy of late, to say the least.

The band recently curated a two day event in Bristol featuring Seefeel, A.R. Kane, Lord Tusk and Roger Robinson, and have upcoming London shows with Dawuna (Nov 14) and A.R. Kane (Feb 22, 2025), with whom they are also collaborating on a release. 

They’re also about to drop their A Soft & Gatherable Star album – out November 8 – and here the trio talk us through it track by track

Oceanside Spider House 

Jas: Amos and I wrote this one together. It’s about the end of the world and is heavily loaded with references to Zelda Majora’s Mask, which me, Al and Amos all played on N64 when we were younger. In the game, the moon is slowly falling from the sky, about to crush everyone. You find a few people who are trying to take shelter, including one character in an oceanside spider house, which is exactly what it says it is. You also meet a couple that aren’t taking shelter, but are just waiting to die together. It’s quite strong for kids, and definitely haunts us.

Gently Fade 

Jas: Recently Al and I have been occupying our own spaces vocally when we write tunes, we accompany each other but that’s usually instrumentally, with me on guitar while Al sings, and Al on keys while I sing. It’s always nice to sing together though, and we’ve found a way to each keep our own vocal styles and melodies while doing so by weaving our parts together. We wrote it one winter day, it was fucking horrible outside and there was sleet and rain hammering at the windows of the studio. I’m pretty sure we were drinking whisky and just trying to keep warm, feeling cocooned by the music.  

Košice Flower 

Amos: This one is named for a holiday me and Jas took to Slovakia back in 2016. We named this track for a row we had over there, I think Jas walked off ahead of me and I found a flower and gave it to her as a peace offering. It was quite a strange holiday, we were staying in this old Soviet-era block a little way out the city and I remember just staying up in the flat most of the time, eating lots of sausage casserole and one night being woken up by this really wild thunderstorm. 

I told Daniela (Dyson) the story of the title and she said it made sense and she’d always heard it as a love song, which is nice. 

Sea Mills 

Jas: I wrote this about a cluster of memories from when I was about 13 or 14 that took place either in Sea Mills (an area in North Bristol) or on our way there.  I was with an older friend, who wasn’t really a great friend thinking back. I would sometimes be left in quite precarious situations, left with people I didn’t know or finding myself tripping on my own in the woods. It’s all messy teenage stuff really, but a lot of those feelings of abandonment and distrust lingered for a long time, and those feelings felt quite bound up in these really strong visceral memories of being alone in the dark in these patchwork areas of nature in the city, which feel like they transform into something else at night. 

The guitar part for it is quite weird and Yankee Doodle-lish as I was very new to playing. I really love the additions that we have on here from our friends J AKA Birthmark on the synth and Lorenzo Prati on the saxophone. J/Birthmark is playing these quite acidic and jarring sounds and then Lorenzo comes in with this really soft and sensitive part on the outro. It really fits with the feeling of the tune lyrically – and I like that there is some resolution at the end, however eerie.  

All Night 

Al: I remember being laid on the floor in Amos’ mum’s study. We’d been writing music the day before and it felt like we’d all hit a bit of a wall. Amos was upstairs on the phone and Jas started playing guitar. I loved what I heard right away, there was something so sweet and painful in the chords she came up with. I kept thinking about sleepless nights with someone you care about nearby, how you want those you love to know how you feel and the need we have to understand each other in general. 

Too Careful 

Al: Jas and Amos had created the bulk of this tune before I added my thing to it. I remember loving the drum loop/sample Amos brought and Jas’ guitar took it to another level. I guess I was thinking about the struggle of making it through day to day and the strength it takes to meet the challenges we face as people. ‘Over and over it’s calling.’ Was just me thinking or the doubt that can linger when we’re trying to make it through stuff we’re dealing with at any given time. 

If I Asked You, You’d Tell Me 

Amos: We made so many ideas and in so many late night headspaces so I can’t remember if that’s me playing bass on there or just the guitar line pitched down. Jas had this really nice two part guitar idea in 3/4 time and sang on it. I think we felt like there was something there but weren’t sure. We must’ve come back to it later (maybe on a late night again) and pitched everything down. We took the main vocal out and just left the echoes of it that got recorded through the reverb. It gave a kind of ghostly quality to it, the words kind of drift in and out of focus.

I’d been obsessed with the idea of working with a cellist for ages (Al likes to say I’m in my orchestral Kanye era atm). I’d been talking with Carl (Them There Records) and started listening to his band Powders with Josh Horsley on cello. Carl introduced us online, and it just grew from there. As soon as Josh sent the song back with the cello on it, everything just fell into place. 

Ashes Over Shute Shelve 

Amos: This is a song for my Dad, and my Mum. The words are a poem he wrote sometime before he died:

And so, full of his life, came  

not to the falls, the whirlpool or the cliff  

but to the brim  

and held a moment above it  

seeing everything.  

I always read it as a death poem. He used to write poems and thoughts and ideas etc, and I think he used writing as a way of trying to understand and come to terms with dying. We’ve had that poem Blu-tacked up on the studio wall for years, so it made sense it would seep into something we did eventually. I was touched when Daniela agreed to read it for us – reading someone else’s words can be a bit of a weird thing to do for some people. But she read it so beautifully. We recorded the vocal in her (then) new flat, with the mic balanced on top of some cardboard boxes from the move. Will (Memotone) added the clarinet afterwards. He played it on my mum’s old childhood clarinet, it meant a lot to me to have a bit of them both (my mum and dad) on the song in that way.  

In The Way 

Al: Me and Amos were getting into some whisky and we’d recorded some rap stuff earlier in the evening. There’s something about cold winter nights that makes songwriting easier for me. A played me this guitar piece he’d recorded on his phone and something clicked. We started working on a completely different tune and eventually I just thought “Man, you obviously just want to write something for that guitar bit”. I had some lyrics down after we’d been working for a little while and I really liked them so I tried them over Amos’ thing and it worked well. I can’t lie, I’m surprised at how good the take was considering how much whisky we put away, ha ha. 

Amos: I remember recording that guitar part on Jas’s dad’s old phone – it was Christmas and I’d taken all the music stuff back to my mum’s place, so all we had in the house was an acoustic guitar. I think I just recorded it in one take, Al pointed out you can hear me breathing on it which is a little gross, but it works. The way the mistakes – like my nail catching a string and making it ring out – worked with Al’s vocal were just one of those moments of magic you sometimes get when everything comes together.  We made a lot of really bad ideas too while making this record, so I feel like the universe owed us a couple of those moments, ha ha. 

Temporary 

Amos: I remember coming into our spare room (which is also the studio) and Jas had made this beat on the drum machine and had a vocal loop going which she was singing over, it was basically the whole song. I added a three note (classic) bassline and that was it. 

Jas: This is the first tune that I think I mainly made by myself. I wrote it quite quickly in the studio one night, and then Amos came in and made sure we recorded it. I had been reading about a cult that some of my family have been caught up in. This cult’s belief in the last judgement involves a “temporary lake of fire”, which is a phrase that really stuck with me. I really can’t get my head around it, that people walk around certain that they are on the right path and that everyone else deserves to suffer. 

To pre-order your vinyl copy of A Soft & Gatherable Star, click here

Photo by Chris Hoare