Donna James walks into her own past the way a nurse walks into a ward at 3am: quietly, competently, and without flinching from what she finds there. That she does so under the alias VelumVelvet, and frames the whole affair as a "Reflection Room" within a sprawling conceptual House, could easily have tipped into whimsy. It doesn't. The piano-room rendering of "Yellow Brick Roads" strips the song down to its bare wiring, and what's left humming underneath is something far sturdier than metaphor: a genuinely moving act of self-address.

Jerusalem does not often export remix albums, and perhaps that scarcity is precisely why *Soulslike* lands with such peculiar force. Eugene Kuzmin, the composer, multi-instrumentalist and evident engine of this Jerusalem collective, has assembled a record that refuses to sit still: part liturgy, part séance, part late-night guitar confession, stitched together with the kind of unbothered confidence that only comes from people who have stopped worrying about which genre they belong to.

Few records carry this much patience in their bones. Many songwriters treat a new album as a chance to empty the notebook in one breathless rush. *Before The End* sounds like the work of someone who has spent long enough around music to know exactly which songs deserved to survive the wait, and which ones didn't make the cut. That discipline is the record's quiet triumph, and it announces itself within the first few bars.