Sinusoidal Music: Jessi Robertson’s ‘Dark Matter’: Artful Alt Pop

By Leela Iyer, Sinusoidal Music

Jessi Robertson is creating a brand of music that far surpasses genre boundaries and conventional styles. Her style can be best described as art rock. Forming with fluid and free contours, it allows the artist the space to expand and explore themes in ways they never have been before. Her music is elastic and vast. Always dynamic. ‘Dark Matter’ is the artist’s latest release, a collection of alt pop that is edged with shadows, mysteries, secrets, and deep emotions. The allure of the songs lie in the confessional vocals blended with cryptic instrumental explorations.

The album opens with ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’, a track that unites pop rock moments with alternative tangents. All in ways that reveal or hide away from you. That feeling of staring at the darkness for long enough, till it shows itself to you. That’s what listening to this track feels like. It is so immersive, fluid, and compelling that you feel like it has, at some point, climbed into your consciousness, and is unravelling as you would. 

Each track is different. It explores so many ways of pain with poetry, strength, and perspective. There’s that struggle but it’s not there to inspire or ignite. The artist is just showcasing, documenting her most vulnerable moments. It’s beautiful to just watch. You’ll especially feel this way in tracks like ‘Shadow War’ and ‘Rogue Star’. The vocals are matchlessly raw in ways that you can trace her edges, her energy and her emotions. 

In tracks like ‘In Dreams Awake’ and ‘The First Law of Thermodynamics’, the artist explores a surreal space. With dazed instrumentals, vivid chords, and a vocal scene that is lost somewhere in the ethereal, these tracks have a way of looping you into that glazed, dark space. It’s dark but it’s pleasantly dark, mixed in with sweet melancholy and a soft romanticism. In ‘Einstein-Rosen Bridge’ and ‘Object of Desire’ we see contemplative darkness. A new shade, a fresh gradient that you can expand into. It’s a gentle abyss that plays with the abstract and the familiar.