On Jaala’s first two albums, 2015’s Hard Hold and 2018’s Joonya Spirit, guitars, drums, bass and vocals ricocheted across the stereo spectrum in a frantic scramble, sharing musical DNA with fellow adventurers such as Deerhoof. The Melbourne band’s sound was all angles and elbows, a jagged web of exciting shapes protecting a tender, wounded core. On their new album Gap Tooth, the bruised soul of songwriter Cosima Jaala is laid bare. Her quartet has become a trio, subbing out second guitar and bass for new member Carolyn Schofield (Fia Fiell) on synths, piano and violin, while drummer Maria Moles remains the band’s fluttering heart. This time around, the guitar and drums’ nervous, shifting gestures are coddled by Schofield’s soundscapes to narcotic effect, while Jaala’s vocals explore themes of falling in love, opening up, and growing through pain rather than being lost in its convulsions.
Schofield’s contributions are most overt on stunning first single “Workhorse,” as she sets up a woozy synth arpeggio, over which pedalled chord washes ebb and flow, Jaala confessing her love: “Out of nowhere you’re there for me / You love me more than you’re allowed to / I’m in line with love / Your precious heart isn’t hard like the others.” The track’s languorous sway feels like listening to hip-hop at half speed, and culminates in some fantastic breakbeats from Moles. Opener “All Here” is similarly gorgeous, tracing strident, reverb-drenched guitar lines over plangent major-sevenths.
The album takes a bit of a detour into more conventional territory during its middle third. On “Funny Shape,” the ascending flashes of piano suggest a warped take on smooth, supper jazz, while “Which Way” exhibits the muscular swing of brassy soul music. Late highlight “I Love You (DJ Set)” foreground’s Jaala’s trademark scurrying, spidery guitar over a smoky trip-hop groove reminiscent of co-producer Nick Herrera’s band Kalacoma, who used to include Moles among their number.
Although Gap Tooth does miss some of the fizzing dynamism of Jaala’s earlier records, the band compensates for this with a consistent, affecting mood that proves immersive and intoxicating.
High in the southern mountains of a wild land, there lies a small village, unremarkable and unimportant, that survives on half-wild goats and sheep and hardy cold-endurant vegetables. It’s an isolated place, and only the few closest villages--each many miles away, and only seeing a representative of this little hamlet once a year or so--and a few grim-faced and sturdy merchants even know it exists. Like many of these small communities, it doesn’t even appear in the local powers’ records, or on their maps. The mountains as a whole are of little interest to modern officials, since they’d be lucky to squeeze five gold a year out of all those tiny villages put together, and they’re far too well-educated to believe in old folk tales of ancient magical artifacts hidden away in the mountain’s many caves and vales.
In such a small community, you’d expect tieflings to be viewed with especial suspicion--and that might have been true for Jaala Khozet and his antecedents, if anyone there had known what the unusual features that sometimes popped up in the bloodline meant. But Jaala’s great-great grandmother had been the village witch, a respectable and important position, and his great-great grandfather had been unwisely unfaithful, and the tale in the village was that the witch had turned her husband to a goat for a while to humiliate him for his behavior, so when the child conceived after he’d changed his ways had been born with horns, and a tail, and cloven hooves... well, it might seem like a just-so story, but the logic of it was simple enough. Jaala had never heard the word ‘tiefling’ in his life--until the wizard came.
Wizards, unlike government officials, tend to follow the trails of old folk tales about hidden magical artifacts. Especially wizards interested in power, and unscrupulous about how they get it. Jaala, who despite his vaguely goatish appearance (his skin was a faded steel blue, and his horns more like a ram’s than a billy goat’s, but he had the hooves and the yellow goat-pupilled eyes and a tuft of fur at the end of his tail, and of course the familial associations) was apprenticed to one of the foresters instead of being responsible for the family herd (six children is too many to live on shepherding alone), was helping haul logs when the wizard arrived, so he and his teacher returned home that evening to a nasty shock: great magical creatures prowling the village, holding their families and friends confined, while the wizard systematically questioned the villagers about magical influences and occurrences in their local folklore.
Jaala’s teacher was a brave woman; she tried to rush one of the wizard’s monstrosities, and was gravely injured for her pains. As she went down, she shouted at Jaala to run, to save himself. He bolted into the trees, terror and obedience both urging him to flee to safety. Once he’d escaped, though, loyalty compelled him to turn back around. He couldn’t turn his back on his village, so how could he help, instead? Going for outside aid seemed a hopeless venture--the nearest villages were days away, and they couldn’t do any more about a wizard than his could. He had only a vague and hazy knowledge of the larger kingdoms that lay in the lowlands, and no idea which one technically ruled his village, but they were weeks away, and besides, he had heard the elders’ opinions on taxes.
He racked his brain for what he knew about wizards. They relied on spellbooks, didn’t they? Just the same as the village witch, who had two of the village’s only three books in her house, one of them a book on anatomy and common diseases, the other a compendium of herbal remedies. All Jaala had to do was find the wizard’s spellbook and take it from him, and the wizard’s spells would be useless. The monsters would vanish, and any spells he was using on the villagers would fade away, and, this was the other thing Jaala knew about wizards, once that happened they bled and died the same as anyone else if you put a knife in them.
It was a solid plan, and it might even have worked, had Jaala had any talent for stealth or subterfuge. Instead he found himself face-to-face with the wizard, half the wizard’s baggage strewn across the ground from Jaala’s frantic digging, a pair of slavering monstrosities poised to pounce. It was only Jaala’s good luck that the wizard moved before the monsters did (though it didn’t seem like good luck at the time), lashing out at Jaala with a cloud of draining magic that drained him, slow and screaming, into a wizened bloodless husk.
Jaala died there. He knows he did, though he doesn’t remember most of it. There was the pain, and then the darkness, and then he stood alone on a level and sunless plain, a dull flat landscape covered in sparse grey grass and a few huddled trees and nothing else to rest the eye on, as far as the dim and sourceless light allowed him to see. And there was the desperate, unquenchable first. There must be some part of the journey he’s forgotten, because all he remembers is the endless plain; he doesn’t remember coming upon the water, at last, only kneeling over the still and stagnant pool and bending his head to drink. And then the cold hand on his back that pushed him in, tumbling headfirst into the black water, and coming back to himself, lying breathless and freezing where the wizard had left his corpse.
It feels, he still swears to this day, like an eternity had passed on that dark plain, though he recalls almost nothing of it. But in the world of the living, it must have barely been a minute, for the wizard was still turning away, his back to the tiefling he’d so casually killed. Jaala doesn’t know where the strength came from to stand, but somehow he rose, silently, muscles somehow working despite the lack of blood in his veins. And he has only the shakiest notion of where the magic came from, either, when he reached out towards the wizard’s exposed back--but come it did, in the form of a skeletal hand closing around the wizard’s neck.
The wizard was stronger, and more knowledgeable, and doubtless more skilled. If it had come to a pitched battle, Jaala has no doubt that he would have died again. But instead the wizard turned and looked at him, and the look in his eyes was one of realization, recognition, one that turned quickly to fear. Not of the trembling, bloodless tiefling who stood before him, Jaala is certain of that, but of whatever power had acted to bring him back to life, and to empower him with sorcery in the bargain. And so the wizard made a panicked gesture, and he, and his monsters, and much of his own, all vanished in a rush of sound and air, leaving the village once again free of his presence.
Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t come back. Jaala knew, in the same unconscious place from which came the instinctive gestures and utterances for his first simple spells, that this the purpose for which he’d been brought back to life. Someday the wizard would return, or someone like him, stronger and more dangerous and better-prepared, and the mysterious power that had raised Jaala wouldn’t be enough to protect them. For the sake of his village, and whatever secrets their hills were hiding, Jaala had to seek out this wizard and his fellows and end the threat that they posed, before they were ready to return and enact it.
He’s not happy about it--leaving his family, leaving the village, leaving his half-learned work and the satisfactions of his simple life. The world beyond the village is terrifying and vast. But it’s literally what he’s here to do, and love and loyalty will not permit him to turn aside from the task. Besides, his family is kind of freaked out by what’s happened to him, and Jaala figures that this way he can give them some space to adapt.
Relentless Nature: If you start your turn below half your max HP, you gain one hit point; if you die, you return to life after 24 hours; if your body is destroyed, you reform (without equipment) within 1 mile of your place of death; you know the distance and direction between you and any creature involved with your goal, if they are on the same plane.
Age: Tieflings mature at the same rate as humans and live a few years longer, except when they are undead revenants who will die when their driving task is done. Jaala is, rather permanently, 24.
Alignment: Neutral Good
Size: Medium (5′6″, 180 lbs)
Speed: 30 feet
Darkvision: 60 feet
Languages: Common
Class: Shadow Sorcerer
Arcane Origin: Your power arises from your family’s bloodline. You are related to a powerful witch, and believe you were touched by her ghost.
Reactions: Your powers are seen as a frightening but valuable blessing by those around you, and you are expected to use them in service to your community.
Supernatural Marks: Your skin has turned a permanent pale blueish-grey, which in contrast to your original coloring is clearly a pallor of death.
Signs of Sorcery: For a moment after you cast a spell, the area immediately around you is freezing cold.
Shadow Sorcerer Quirk: You barely bleed, even when badly injured.
Strength of the Grave: When damage reduces you to 0 hit points, except when the damage is radiant damage or caused by a critical hit, you can make a Charisma saving throw (DC 5 + damage taken). On a success, you instead drop to 1 hit point. After a success, you cannot use this again until you finish a long rest.
Background: Folk Hero
Defining Event: An ancestor’s magical intervention empowered me to drive away a threat to my community.
