There’s a refusal to tidy things up at the centre of In The End. The new four-track EP from Australian outsider artist Hurb Jephasun is deliberately left raw, preserving room noise, breath, imperfect vocals and the physical presence of the instruments. It’s an approach that certainly suits an artist whose history stretches back through decades of underground music.
Across ‘Lost’, ‘In The End’, ‘Pray’ and ‘The First Time’, he treats roughness as part of the language. The production isn’t lo-fi for merely decoration. Its imperfections reinforce the sense that these songs are being presented as lived objects rather than carefully manufactured recordings. There’s weight in the keys, strain in the voice and an immediacy that would likely disappear if every edge were polished away.
Raised in the remote Australian bush with little access to the wider cultural world, he eventually found his way into Sydney’s inner-city underground during the 80s and 90s. Now based in Perth, he fronts The Polite Society, plays keys with The Beautiful Losers and releases music under his own name.
And In The End feels particularly connected to that last identity, as the EP is framed as the sound of somebody who has spent years playing within other projects finally allowing his own voice to occupy the foreground. But there’s no dramatic reinvention attached to that shift. Instead, the singer-songwriter seems to trust the habits accumulated over a lifetime: such as economy, atmosphere and a willingness to leave uncomfortable textures intact.
At only four tracks in length, In The End isn’t attempting to summarise an entire career. Its value is more modest and perhaps more convincing than that. It captures Hurb Jephasun as he is now: experienced, unvarnished and apparently uninterested in disguising the wear accumulated along the way.
Some releases try to remove every crack they produce. But this one understands that the cracks are often where the character lies.