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Blondie’s "Shayla" — a song Jeremy Jay has now covered twice — embodies a tension between bounded earthiness, the particular, the everyday life of work and meals and TV, and, immanent within it but not of it, a transcendent dimension. (Often, but not always, this transcendence comes about through romantic love.) Either pole can manifest as a kind of deindividuation (assembly-line in the first case, blissful union in the second) or as an expression of the contingent and idiosyncratic. This distinction, narrated more or less successfully, is a classic paradigm of indie pop, but sometimes it's literally embodied within a particular voice and vision. Such a voice is Jay's.
Indeed, as if Jay were Gary Wilson’s good twin, one gets the sense of a private universe of meaning that is nonetheless encompassed by the familiar musical world of love, loss, and rock 'n' roll. There have always been shades of darkness and complexity lingering beneath the pretty indie surfaces of Jay’s work — as witnessed in earlier covers of Suicide, Eno, and Siouxsie — but here these themes are expressed sonically, rather than in lyrics or cultural reference points. If there is any criticism to be made, it's that the songs are just slightly too samey over the course of the album, but when they're so hooky without a trace of obviousness, this is a minor defect.
With Dream Diary, it feels like Jay's persona has developed from awkward, lovestruck, yet still sophisticated adolescent, to sophisticated yet still awkward and lovestruck man, but to leave it at this would be to deny the elusive refinement of his work. Like Scott Walker in his early solo period, Jay is making accomplished and deeply interesting contemporary pop music while also teasing the listener with seductive unfolding visions of immanence as evolutionary possibility.
