REVIEWS

Eden is usually painted as some glittering fairy-tale garden—a man, a woman, a snake, an apple, and a catastrophe that supposedly cursed everyone forever. But imagine instead that paradise was just a quiet farm on the border of England and Wales. Picture sheep wandering lazily, hens darting around the yard, teenagers sneaking Baileys from someone’s dad’s cupboard, blasting Kanye on a hilltop, and shouting along to a ridiculous song called “Dubstep in My Trousers.” Imagine a place so calm and sweet you could stay for a week without ever checking your beat-up old Nokia. The sun feels like morning, even though morning never quite arrives. That’s the kind of heaven Joscelin Dent-Pooley—better known as Jerskin Fendrix—recreates on his second album.

It’s a world pulled straight from his own childhood in remote Shropshire in the late 2000s, long before he became an Oscar-nominated composer and one of Yorgos Lanthimos’ favorite collaborators. Despite the surreal success of his adult life, he sings about those rural teenage years with a tenderness and sincerity that make them feel mythic. His huge, echoing voice—fit for some tragic figure on a grand stage—turns these humble memories into something universal. Even if you grew up in a city, you can feel the pull of the world he describes, the barns turned into makeshift party halls, the feeling of belonging to a place that seems harmless and enchanted. Yet beneath the album’s early beauty—the chirping, clockwork-like vocals and chamber-music grace of the opening track “Beth’s Farm”—there’s already a sense that something is wrong. When he repeats the line “and nobody dies on Beth’s farm,” it starts to sound less like a statement and more like a desperate wish.

That longing makes sense when you know what shaped this album. Fendrix wrote Once Upon a Time… in Shropshire after losing both a close childhood friend to suicide and his father in an unexpected tragedy. Death moves through these songs like weather—quiet at times, overwhelming at others. On “The Universe,” he asks in a soft, almost childlike voice, “Are you still alive somewhere in the universe?” as if singing the question might close the distance between him and the people he’s lost. On “Last Night in Shropshire,” the landscape itself becomes a metaphor for grief, the river rising “inch by inch” as he sings in a gravelly, exhausted tone. And then there are moments where he doesn’t dress death up at all. “Fuck I’m buzzing, I’ve been drinking so much White Claw,” he mutters on “King Lear,” before landing the blunt, chilling line: “Who will call to say you died?”

The album swings between wonder and devastation, between a farm that feels like heaven and memories that refuse to stay sweet. And in that space—between the innocence of youth and the ache of loss—Fendrix finds something painfully, beautifully human.