Jandek Albums of 2020 - Reviews

2020 was the year that Jandek released more albums than any year yet (ten). Of course, though, they're all live albums recorded in years long past. Considering that Jandek impressively performs completely new and unique music during every live show (only very rarely doing live versions of songs from old albums), it makes sense that Corwood Industries wants to release every recording of a live show as its own album. 

I'm past the point of having any sense of order in which I post my Jandek reviews -- if I try to post them in the order that I wrote them, it would be a lot more work for me because my older review drafts are much sloppier and longer. So I'm going to take a huge leap forward and post a bundle of reviews of relatively new albums for you all!

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Berlin Sunday: Laid back rock show with Sheila Smith on vocals. Not super memorable except for the faster songs, you can just skip this one honestly. 6/10

Manhattan Saturday: Nearly 3 hour non-stop noise rock performance across 3 discs. Wow, I have to admire the musical endurance and the energy. But the music is pretty standard Jandek-style noise rock, with only a few exciting moments. 6.5/10

Boston Friday: Avant-garde jazz album not far off from London Thursday, also pretty long. Not necessarily essential but if you want something similar to the other jazz albums, definitely check it out. 7/10

Montreal Sunday: Pretty creepy, haunting album that matches the album cover very well. The harpsichord gives it a slightly gothic, despairing tone. Meanwhile, the flute and saxophone occasionally goes back to the jazzy theme of the last few albums, and then the guitar adds dissonance. The style is generally very sparse and quiet and focuses on the emotional intensity of a moment rather than the energy of the performers. The lyrics are quite confessional and raw and center around death. The music is really inaccessible; this is probably one of the most difficult Jandek listens at 2 hours long total and with a couple of the most depressing tracks being over 30 minutes long. However, the raw emotion and subtlety evoked from this performance and its uniqueness are undeniable. 8/10

Fort Worth Saturday: Another accessible album with country blues influences (i.e. fiddle and banjo, country-ish lyrics and vocals), pretty similar to Hamman Hall! But it’s a little boring and long. Regardless, gotta love some relatively accessible country Jandek. Some parts are also genuinely hilarious because of Sterling's overly dramatic country-imitating vocals. 7/10

Rudyard’s: Jandek does so many genres on these live albums and we finally get to the Jandek funk rock show! Sterling plays guitar (noisy and weirdly melodic, similar to Houston Thursday) and sings with some band members who play wonky bass and drums with groove and rhythm. The crowd is unbelievably invigorating too - they react to every lyric, the cheering is great, and they even chant to the beat at one point. The CD consists of just one song titled “Two O’Clock Sun” with a few different sections. The lyrics are simple and charming, they’re like a stream of consciousness throughout a narrator’s day. It’s certainly a fun show and I understand all the hype around it. It boils down to the fun Jandek funk song, and it’s not as profound as his best work and it doesn’t try to expand beyond one idea despite being an hour long. Basically, that’s why I’m not calling it a top 10 Jandek album or anything, but I still love it, of course. 8/10

Grinnell Saturday: An instrumental chamber performance with Sterling on piano, plus band members on oboe, violin, and double bass. It’s basically a fully instrumental version of the brilliant Atlanta Saturday. However, this isn’t quite as coherent, with slightly more amateur-sounding instrumentalists. Sometimes they don’t even play in the same key as each other. And it’s a lot more boring, actually, since it’s 2 hours long and there are no lyrics. There are still some pretty sweet melodies here, and you have to love the more accessible Jandek performances. 7/10

Amsterdam Saturday: Pretty standard, relatively short noise rock performance with rather poetic lyrics. I guess it’s got pretty good bass too. A few fantastic highlights like the first song, but it drops off aside from that. 6.5/10

Aarhus Sunday: I finished all the previous Jandek albums a month ago and I waited the entire month for someone to upload his 2 most recent albums to the Internet so I could finally finish the whole Corwood discography and…!!! Well, this isn’t that big of a finale. It doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. It’s your typical Jandek experimental rock show, with a very slow pace, calm droning vocals, and a long length; the main point of interest is the piano, which is played by two instrumentalists: Sterling Smith and Phil Todd. It’s slightly jazzy especially with the piano and Alex Neilson’s avant-garde drumming. It’s fine and non-offensive but it’s just so extremely skippable. 6.6/10

San Francisco Saturday: 2 hour show with the usual noisy rock style. The most unique part is Tom Carter’s bass, which is highly distorted and loud, making the show sound more like a duet between two guitars. The lyrics here are also pretty depressing and pessimistic. “Stop Hurting Me” was a highlight, the bass there kept a memorable kind of rhythm. But there’s also “Alone”, the most suggestive song I think the man ever wrote. It’s pretty hard to judge such an enormously long show though… I might raise my score if I relisten to it and get a better feel for it, but it’s also unlikely that I’ll do that considering the amount of Jandek live albums to revisit. 7.4/10

Mr. Berry's Classroom

Old nonfiction essay from 2020 that I rediscovered.

Mr. Berry’s classroom at my high school was one of the strangest rooms in the school. It wasn’t arranged or decorated very aesthetically. Unlike the social studies or math teachers’ rooms, there weren’t many educational resources hung up on the walls. There were, instead, some pieces of ‘art’ that represented Mr. Berry’s personal interests. A poster of the band Nirvana. A painting by Picasso. A white board with the tournament schedule of the debate team with a poop emoji plushie taped on top of a section of the board dedicated to the “bleep list”. A folder with a picture of Taylor Swift saying “Permission slips go in here”? Yeah, this is where it starts to get weird.

Mr. Berry was not just an American Literature and AP Language teacher, but he was also the debate coach. The debate team had their practices every Tuesday and Thursday in his classroom after classes ended. Moments after his last class ended, the debate kids would come rushing into the classroom and start stacking chairs on top of the desks. They would put their laptops on top of the chairs and start opening up word documents, which contained evidence for debate rounds. The assistant coach Mr. Hausman would stand up and say “Speaking drills, 30 seconds” and watch everyone get ready to start reading at the speed of light. In policy debate, you have to read your evidence as fast and clearly as possible to overwhelm the opponent with your arguments. Every practice, they would all read super fast at the same time for 13 minutes straight. The first 8 minutes was a standard speaking drill, and the remaining 5 minutes was for a torturous “clarity drill”. The coaches would pick some sort of punishment to make the debaters’ reading harder, whether that was having a pen in your mouth or having to say the word “watermelon” in between every word. 

It goes without saying that their practices could get very chaotic. Debate kids can be very loud and outspoken. The events and “inside jokes” of debate can get pretty crazy. It gets so crazy that the coaches felt the need to make a “poop list” (but in other words) next to the tournament calendar. Every time a debater makes a tremendous fool of themselves, their name and their fault goes on the list. This included when varsity debaters would accidentally tell freshmen about debate things they weren’t supposed to know about yet, like sneaky argument strategies. 

Jandek - Lost Cause - Review

https://corwoodindustries.com/product/0759/

Lost Cause is one of the most unique Jandek albums and definitely worth a listen for anyone who's trying to get through the highlights of his discography. The album is generally split up into a very accessible and warm first half, and a crazy avant-garde second half. The first half's set of acoustic blues songs include fan-favorite masterpieces, the dark "How Many Places" and the heartbreaking "Crack a Smile", which was covered by someone as big as Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. The second track, "Babe I Love You", is sparsely produced, but is also Jandek's poppiest acoustic song. It features some of his most infamously absurd lyrics, such as "Baby, I love you / Look outside / Genitals".  

The middle tracks "God Came Between Us" and "I Love You Now It's True" feature more experimental and repetitive strumming, similar to the earlier Jandek albums, but are still very engaging songs that show growth in songwriting and guitar technique.

“God came between us, God came between us

And he lit our hearts on fire and put it out with oceans

Nobody’d ever see us, nobody’d ever know

But God came between us, God came between us”

We can't go without mentioning the final song, "The Electric End", an unexpected 19-minute behemoth of a full band going nuts with free improvisation and noise rock. The guitar goes wild, with hints of blues influences, with Sterling shouting random things and a crazy wind instrument entering a few minutes in. Revisiting this track after listening to the whole Jandek discog, it's still an impressive feat. 

Overall, Lost Cause is one of the most varied and thoughtfully-conceptualized Jandek albums of them all. 

9/10

The Making of "Gazing"

Lyrics and music inspired by a dream from 6/30/2021

Written July 2021

“Gazing” was (out of these) the last song I dreamed, the last song I wrote, and naturally the last song on the album. In the dream, I was watching an R&B style music video -- all I remember is a blue sky and a woman dancing -- with lyrics appreciating the musicianship of shoegaze. However, the lyric was, oddly “I see you’re standing straight” -- which doesn’t make sense because those musicians are supposed to be gazing at “shoes” or the pedals on the floor, right? So it was fun to integrate that into the lyrics somehow. The instrumentation in the dream had guitar, as well as a synth and drum part that sounded exactly like “Hip Hop Is a Way of Life” by Kim Hiorthøy, an experimental electronic song that I absolutely adore.

I’m really proud of the guitar on this song. The short guitar intro was the first thing I came up with, using already well-known chords, but that didn’t sound enough like what I heard in the dream. After noodling around, I came up with chords that sounded exactly like the dream. Making up completely new chords is always fun. 

The biggest challenge was to make the song as close as possible to “Hip Hop Is a Way of Life”. I don’t know why I had to make it so similar, I just had to because I loved the song so much. I borrowed several melodies and sound design quirks from the song, but still tried to keep it original. I tried to get help from Tobias to design the “clarinet” sound to be like the original song, but I ended up using the one I produced anyway. Tobias mostly ended up helping to improve drums and the chorus synth. I wish the clarinet was mixed even louder so you all could hear my effort in making it the closest clone to Kim Hiorthøy as I could, but I recognize that would’ve been a little obnoxious. 

The Making of “June 18th”

Music inspired by 2 dreams from 6/18/2020 and 6/18/2021

Written July 2021

“June 18th” is easily one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written, but it was also one of the easiest to write. Almost all of the lyrics and melodies were just taken right from the 2 dreams I had - both of which were somehow on the date June 18th, exactly one year apart. The song is probably just the most straightforward love song I made. What I find interesting is that, after I dreamed the lyrics “I got a box with your old ID”, the account of the subject person got deleted for some reason, meaning he lost access to all our old texts and now only I could read them... the song manifested itself into reality. 

I had another dream that there was a song where the first half was sung passionately by Jandek, an avant-garde folk musician, and the second half was sung by pop songwriter Fiona Apple and produced with a chamber pop style. Like Jandek usually does, I improvised the first half of the song on guitar with random made-up chords. I’m glad I got a good one on the first take. 

For the piano and strings in the second half, I just played what felt right in my heart -- but for some reason, part of me thought it wasn’t good enough for a long time, probably ‘cause I’m not a pianist or string arranger. I eventually decided this arrangement was good enough, though, especially because the person who I dedicated the song to told me that the demo made him cry. With some help from a collaborator Will to make the string arrangement more dramatic and professional, I re-recorded the song and was very happy with it. 

The Making of “Hinman Park”

Lyrics and music inspired by a dream from 6/21/2020

Written July 2021

The song was inspired by a brief dream that I only remember vaguely; at the end of the dream, I knew I had committed a crime, and I had gone to the nearby park to wait until I knew I was just going to get caught anyway. I started to hear the song as a soundtrack to the dream. My dreams about serious crimes and tragedies are emotionally resonant for me, especially when it’s about me doing something I wouldn’t have wanted to do. In the lyrics, I compare the image of standing in the park after committing a crime to the feeling of waiting with anxiety about completely insignificant circumstances. 

I didn’t remember what genre the song from the dream was, so I took this song as a blank slate, and chose arrangements that I thought would fit the thematic atmosphere. I recruited my previous collaborator Mestup to help me with the piano. I wanted something more detailed and dark as the song progressed, but I couldn’t come up with anything beyond simple chords. Thankfully, Mestup came through with an absolutely gorgeous composition for the rest of the song on the first try, and the song was almost done. After spending a lot of time pondering over how to complete the song, I added the minimalist synthesized string arrangement. 

The Making of “Only a Hunter”

Lyrics inspired by several different dreams

Music inspired by 2 dreams from 10/14/2019 and 7/1/2020

Written July 2021/November 2021

My goal for the album was to be as eclectic as possible, so of course, I have to include a dance-pop/club-influenced song. The song is about various situations in which you just become evil when you’re by yourself (“The club of the hide, the things I hide, the things that you can’t see) -- especially in a dream, when the mind is unhinged. Because of the album flow, I had to put this song after “Poor Face”, but it does kind of hurt because that song is about how we don’t have to live like animals, but “Only a Hunter” is basically about living like an animal (“Whoa, place is allowed, only a hunter”). 

This was definitely the hardest song on the album to make. For the first demo, I was too embarrassed about my electronic production skills to make anything substantial. I made a generic synth and beat to convey what I basically wanted with the song, but it was nothing like the dancey house music that was in my mind. I gave Ramiel this demo to mess around with, and said that I was hoping for something like deep house and the group Everything But the Girl.

But it took maybe 20 iterations and back-and-forth changes of this song to get something that resembled the final one. A big problem was that we had disagreements over the genre influences of this song -- should it sound like drum and bass? No, that doesn’t sound like it did in my dream. Then Ramiel suggested that it should be really crazy and experimental, deconstructed club-esque, because then it would “fit” the sound of the rest of the album. But like, I didn’t really need this song to be experimental or deconstructed, or for the album to have any kind of genre cohesion -- I just wanted to recreate my dreams. I repeatedly had to show the evolving song to my other friends to get some outside perspectives on it because something was clearly going wrong and I was stressed out. Ramiel still helped a lot, though, by making a genuine house beat for the song. They made some really wildly different versions of the song that I would lift small ideas from, to gradually get to the perfect version.