Saturn Returns is Canadian indie musician Jake Nicoll’s latest LP. Departing from some of Jake’s folkier releases over the past years, Saturn Returns is built upon layers of synthesizers, crunchy delays, driving drum machines and drum kit. Ranging from full blown synth pop, to new wave, to brooding experimental dungeon synth, Saturn Returns highlights a different side of Jake Nicoll’s songwriting and sonic craftsmanship.

Jake began working on Saturn Returns six years ago in honour of his 30th birthday, naming the project after the astrological concept associated with the 30th year transition from youth into adulthood. With no particular sense of urgency, Jake used these songs and sessions as a sonic and emotional counter-point while recording his other more organic guitar-based albums Pool House and Lonely Mission. The making of the album became a creative tool; whenever recording his other albums started to feel laborious or too serious Jake would switch over to Saturn Returns and indulge an “anything goes” spirit in a world of synthesizers. The result is a catchy and rhythmic album that explores darker themes and emotions. The upbeat opening track “Try To Believe Me” describes a series of characters with high spiritual aspirations living in a shoddy, broken world. The chorus is a call for credulity, asking the listener to see the “spirits all around” and the fact that we are collectively “on our way down.” The pumping side-chained synthesizers reach out from between the disco inspired drums like the voices of ghosts. In “On and On” Jake continues on the theme of a decaying world, describing a “crooked wooden house” and a “crooked crowd below”, morphing and decaying through time. The warbled Rhodes keyboard warps back and forth as the round bass drum punches along like the ticking of a clock. The third track “Living In A Minor Key” is an up tempo ode to a melancholy life, coming across almost as a defence of one’s depressive states of mind and treasures and comforts that can be found down in the depths. Consistent with Jake’s other studio albums, Saturn Returns was almost exclusively recorded alone by Jake, with exception of the track “Free Space” featuring Pamela Mackenzie singing a counter-melody on the choruses.