Assistant :: Certain Memories

In “Song For Jil”, a son hopes his mother will feel at home in the house she has returned to. She has left hospital.

Shipley designed clothes for Jackie's teenage readers. After a fall in 2022, dementia tightened its hold and took her hand from her: she could no longer draw. Her son Jonathan dedicates to her the fifth album by Assistant, a Brighton trio in which he and Peter Simmons share guitars and vocals, while Anne-Sophie Marsh brings keyboards and a second voice. The record came out in 2025, with physical editions on Subjangle.

The vocabulary is that of guitar pop which never raises its voice, with acoustic touches and the odd electronic swerve. You can hear the memory of Felt, the low-lit rooms of Yo La Tengo, the effortless sweetness of Belle and Sebastian. The comparison that holds best, though, lies elsewhere: these songs sit like a kitchen garden behind the house at the end of the season, where you gather what's left and make it last. The videos that accompany some of the tracks have a touching simplicity, and they left me with a wistful smile, the same one that stayed with me through the whole listen. Fragments of memory, pieces of a life hung on gardens, walks, attachments. Feelings held by someone who doesn't give in to them and moves through them in a light of their own.

"Song For Jil" makes the strongest case, and it makes it through the words. Wishes for recovery turn, line by line, into wishes to be recognised. The son remembers being reassured as a child and only now discovers what that reassurance cost. Slow chords, a voice left in the reverb: an arrangement that fits words spoken with just the right hesitation.

"Jil Is Fading" has a more immediate melodic pull, with Helen McCookerybook on harmonies and melodica. Its nautical imagery is less exact than the domestic speech of the previous track, but the wedding setting complicates the plain grief of the chorus: at his own wedding, Shipley mourns his mother while she is still there, sitting among the guests.

At his wedding, Shipley grieves for his mother while she is still there.

"Raking Leaves" shifts the pressure: Pete's humour lets an ordinary chore, raking leaves, take up a whole afternoon without asking for anything more. On "Before and After You" the electronic turn is measured, and it carries the scent of a 1990s spring, the one of keyboards that mimicked the wind without ever stirring any.

"Fresh Ingredients" holds the sharpest image on the record: a room kept exactly as it was, whose objects no longer guarantee recognition. The practical vocabulary of the title gives forgetting an almost embarrassing solidity, like a full pantry and no one left who remembers the recipes. The bedroom pop label, intimate and at times playful, holds up here. The guitars guide the listener the way a hedgerow guides a lane. Anne-Sophie's voice stays within a delicacy she never shows off, and the message reaches you before anything can mediate it, whole. Towards the end an indie shoegaze vein surfaces and slowly seeps through the song, like a field after rain.

"A Million Stars" closes on electronic accompaniment pared to the bone. Affection is repeated down a telephone line that never closes the distance. After the possibility of a cure that opened the first track, the last call ends without any equivalent reassurance. You're left holding the receiver, like someone standing at the gate after the cart has gone by.

Music for people, and for anyone who has lost sight of someone still sitting right beside them.