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The Book Of Jubilees is an ancient religious work covering much of the same ground as Genesis and detailing the history of creation recounted in divisions of of 49 years each, or Jubilees.The UK will celebrate Her Majesty The Queen’s 70th anniversary as monarch in 2022. Pete Um was born in 1970 and after a peripatetic early life left him with a nervous, eschatological disposition he moved to Cambridge to be close to the Gog Magog Hills. He finds English twilight profoundly unsettling and tries to make his own music and not drink other people’s cider.

All Pete Um albums are compilations, but this is a collection of music drawn from material produced circa 2019. These tracks largely predate those on A British Passport, the album made during the pandemic on Cafe Oto’s Takuroku imprint and released as a download in 2021.

If the songs on Twilight Jubilee have common themes those would be the end of things, isolation, dysfunction and decay. Entropy and ephemerality. In Art-speak I suppose it was also an attempt to make a more pared-down music with a starker feel which exploits texture and tone.

But there’s a heterogeneity in the gloomy greyscale mix. Good is an Amazon review of the prevailing hegemony, A Man is an exalting (?) piss-take of uh, manhood. Sally Ann celebrates the previously mentioned ephemerality via the metaphor of the endless rebirth of charity shop stock. When We Get High sparkles with psychedelic possibility and planetary reconnection and Sure and Saracen just want to get back on dry land somewhere.

There are 23 songs and just 238 copies of this record so get it whilst it’s still around.