★★★

Heavy Dayswas the first instalment of Jeff the Brotherhood’s spiritual trilogy, followed byWe Are The Championsa couple of years after that.

Five years later comes the concluding chapter, Zone.

The album opens in ominous style with a thundering beat and a heavy slacker vocal, sounding like Pavement on a diet of Quaaludes. “I’m totally dead, I’m totally cool”. That said, it’s not quite in gear; the tempo rapidly drops off and we find ourselves stuck in a field staring into the sky waiting for direction.

Eventually the void is filled with the meat-and-potatoes electro-spiked garage rocker ‘Punishment’, before the album strikes onwards with ‘Ox’, a lost demo from some polluted, sharp filled waterway in a shitty Pacific north west town. ‘Habit’ hangs off a simple, repeated riff, and is arguably one of the strongest melodic metaphors for narcotic obsession since The Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’.

Finally there’s ‘Portugal’, a jolt of introspective musings about life on the road. If you’re ever going to hit the wall on tour, ‘Portugal’ is where shit’s going to get fucked up. Zone doesn’t give you all the answers to life’s questions, but it sure helps you see the light.

Jeff The Brotherhood’sZoneis out now through Dine Alone Records.

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