Jackie O Motherfucker - Earth Sound System (Fire)
3/5
By: Stephen Maughan
Earth Sound System, the 15th album from one of the most innovative and atmospheric bands around, starts off with one of the most beautiful songs I've heard all year. 'In The Willows' is a solemn hymn about facing up to loss, the delicacy of memory, and confronting your own mortality (“Clouds are shaped like disaster, my prayers unfold even faster...”). It's powerful stuff, coming across like an even more downbeat Jason Pierce, or Deserter's Song's era Mercury Rev. Tom Greenwood's voice sounds fragile but dignified on this amazing piece of work, pretty much worth the cost of the album alone.
Alas, it’s also the best thing on the album by quite some margin. It’s not that JOM have run out of ideas - they are still striding out musically, coming up with new sounds and techniques, and we've still got the thrillingly freeform, distorted and vocal-free pieces to break up the more straightforward acoustic numbers. It's just at that times, you know they can do better. This is clearly evident on a song like 'Dedication' - it's overlong, a little boring and its numbing repetition of the line “this is dedicated to the person who is trying to find the next right thing to do” will drive you slightly loopy after just a few listens. I get the bit about creating a hypnotic trance and the power of words, after all, it’s something they’ve done to devastating effect in the past. But it just doesn't work here – you’ll wonder why they couldn't just write down this 'dedication' somewhere in the liner notes instead. For an album of only six tracks and just 40 minutes long, you really can't afford throw away songs like this.
Still, things pick up again with the instrumental and spacey 'Rage Separating', and end with the knockout blow of ‘Where We Go's impressive wave of drums, feedback-whirling guitars and Greenwood howling away has the band sounding far more confident, triumphant even. Only Jackie O Motherfucker could deliver an album like this, where we begin with an introspective signature tale of regret of 'In The Willows' and finish with 'Where We Go' with all guns blazing. Yet despite the four songs in between these two displaying occasional flashes of brilliance, there are as many moments of weakness 'dedication'. That’s why, despite my overwhelming love for the opener, I can't award this one five stars.
The thing is, Jackie O Motherfucker are one of the few bands currently active truly doing their own thing, exploring and expanding musical boundaries, always remaining innovative and experimental, treating music as a very high form of art. To my mind, there's no greater praise one can give a band. Ok, so Earth Sound System might not be in the same league as Fig 5 or Liberation, but it's spiked with that thrilling artistic brilliance which admirers of all musical genres, be it pop, classical, jazz, or rock, can appreciate and enjoy.
Jackie O Motherfucker "Where We Go" by FIRE RECORDS
Artists in this article: Jackie O Motherfucker
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