Jabu
Severn Flood Plain/Where You Run To – EP
Six of Swords
12” | 12” Ltd | DL
Released 6 November 2026
★★★★★ 5/5
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Bristol’s Jabu release the “great lost song” of Twin Peaks on their atmospheric new EP. Richard Foster lets it wash over him.
The Severn, “Britain’s mightiest river”, so described by another Bristol luminary, Professor Ronald Hutton, finds musical form with this brilliant and all-too-short EP from Jabu. To stay Huttonish in spirit, we can see it as an outlier for the main ceremonial gathering, a full album, the trio’s fourth, released in 2027. The EP is described in music biz-speak as a “stand-alone double A-side Disco Mix 12” – we say: it’s absolutely knockout.
The opener, Severn Flood Plain, has all the things fans of the band will recognise: the ghostly backdrop; a fathomless lower register – is it a bass?; moody, romantic vocals; and a quiet melody that worms its way into the cranium. The track’s high-pitched, sonar-like tick of a beat may cause Bunnymen fans to listen to Fuel again. But so strong is the track’s late-Eighties feel, you can almost feel anger on their behalf that it didn’t get chosen to feature in season one of Twin Peaks.
Fallow Land is a remix of Severn Flood Plain, a mix of gothicke post-punk and dub, where atmosphere is everything. The sort of music playing on your headphones which encourages you to stop and investigate – in precise, miniaturist detail – the droplets falling from the tree leaves in a misty city park in the autumn. That kind of thing.
Where You Run To begins as another Tarkovskyan mood-zone with the drip-drip of percussion from the drum machine, but the warm and increasingly delayed and dubbed vocal sends things in a more soulful direction, and we feel empathy flooding in as we are told, “my heart can break”. More spacey, jazzy synths and soft guitar lines add to the feeling that it’s forever 1988. Hideaway continues the synth plod back to a more Stalker-like direction, as the synths now manifest in a more paranoid manner. It feels as if we are circling the UN tower in perpetuum. Now and again, scraps of disembodied voices or shavings from an original guitar line float in.
Moody? Not ‘arf. But great, get hold of it.
More about Jabu here.
LABEL’s site is here.
All words by Richard Foster. More writing by Richard can be found at his author’s archive.
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