Jandek - Nine-Thirty - Review

I mainly think of Nine-Thirty as the point where I realized Jandek’s genuine talent for guitar and the evolving maturity of his songwriting. It’s starting to feel less like amateur demos and more like an artist with a vision. The entire album is on acoustic guitar (a little bit of a surprise after some experimental rock albums), but there’s still a lot of variety compared to where he started out. There are clear instances of fretting and fairly complex strumming and picking, while still sounding bitter and somewhat repetitive. While there will inevitably be people who still argue that Jandek can’t play guitar, I say that on Nine-Thirty, he’s proven that he’s “mastered” his particular style of alternately-tuned playing to be more engaging. It also definitely sounds more planned out than random or improvised. 

Tracks such as “Tell Me When”, “Nine-Thirty”, and the instrumental “Tumblings” feature fast, intense strumming like Later On. The moments when the strings buzz add to the haunting mood of the songs and sound intentional. “Nine-Thirty” is a little catchy and has the most obvious instance of fretting on the album, and “Tumblings” has a subtle instrumental reference to “European Jewel”. (I highly recommend reading the extensive piece on Jandek by Nicole Marchesseau, which not only analyses the themes of each album, but interprets the recurring theme of the “European Jewel” riff throughout the Jandek discography.) 

Other songs feature more subtle, hypnotic picking like “Faye” and “This Is a Death Dream”. These work almost as well with the guitar being a sort of “percussion”. The best part of these is perhaps the way the vocals work together with the rhythm and tone of the guitar with a good amount of dissonance and a lonely, pained mood. 

The lyrics are mostly simple, and the most common theme is fear, with a few instances of a love theme. Jandek sounds genuinely afraid on a few of the songs, especially “Voices in the Dark”, a masterpiece on the album, where he ends with a morbid laugh as he tries to suppress his fear of the voices. The clear lyrical standout on the album is “This Is a Death Dream”, one of the most haunting and emotionally effective songs I’ve ever heard from Jandek. The singer describes his regular excursions to the cemetery where he searches for books, but only finds death books. His friends are too afraid and silly to help him at all. It ends with an invasion of “death monsters” into his house as his friends run away in terror, but Jandek stares on. It is certainly one of Jandek’s most poetically profound songs and represents the disappointment toward others that may not understand the human relationship with death as well as one does. The weeping guitar works well, along with Jandek’s increasingly concerned vocals throughout the song. 

There are a handful of throwaway short songs that don’t have any notable moments or lyrics, and the album overall doesn’t tell as much of a conceptual story as some of the previous albums did, having more scattered lyrical references, like lots of mentions of travelling and locations. The song structures are also generally repetitive as is the case with most Jandek albums. However, I still enjoyed the vast majority of this album, and I think it’s definitely one of the most solid and effective acoustic Jandek albums. 

7.5/10

Essential album?: Yes

Essential songs:

Faye

Voices in the Dark

This is a Death Dream*

Nine-Thirty

Jandek - Modern Dances - Review

Well, Modern Dances is one of the most confusing Jandek albums I’ve heard so far and that’s saying a lot considering how baffling the man’s entire existence is. I didn’t really know what to expect going into this one. The album cover is apparently from the same day as Blue Corpse, but really this sounds a lot more like Telegraph Melts, Part 2, which is confusing because the album sequence is Telegraph Melts - Follow Your Footsteps (a more normal album) - Modern Dances. 

This is similar to Telegraph Melts in that it’s an experimental noise rock album with 3 singers - Nancy, Jandek (not heard as much as the other 2), and the second scary guy who sounds like Jandek. There is a lot of brutal screaming, nonsense guitar work, and really disturbing lyrics (“Twelve Minutes Since February 32’nd”, the biggest WTF song ever). I like some of the disturbing lyrics, and I can pick out a few that were really memorable, especially when some of the songs reach their “narrative peak”, but some other songs also go absolutely nowhere and drag on for REALLY long like “I Painted My Teeth” (“Karl Marx painted his teeth!”), “I Want to Know Why”, and “Nothing Is Better Than God”. The latter of which is somehow my favorite and least favorite song on the album at the same time. The lyrics are a little bit funny and sarcastic at times, but Jandek’s repetition of “GOD GOD GOD GOD!!!” over 13 times is horrible. The ending is one of the shocking memorable moments that I love as Nancy despairingly yells, “I want to love you, God / I want to know God / I want to love you God / I want to be you / Is that wrong? Is that right? / I don’t think there’s anything, God”

Nancy’s parts are definitely the strongest point here. The guys are mostly screaming all their lines randomly and possibly improvising lyrics, but Nancy has some semblance of composition and melody, which are sometimes beautiful and sometimes fittingly ugly. Her vocal solo, “Spiritual Song”, is not bad at all. She also has a funny moment on “Number 512” where it sounds like she’s improvising lyrics, and in the middle of it she’s trying to “discreetly” tell the drummer to change it up. 

For the last 3 tracks, Jandek throws us one of the biggest curveballs so far and switches to solo acoustic guitar with Jandek on vocals. These tracks were extremely haunting and I felt like I’d stepped into a completely different dimension or nightmare from the rest of the album. I really like the lyrics on these last songs, which go back to a confessional singer/songwriter style. “Open E” is the first appearance of the lyrics from “I Know the Times” from You Walk Alone. 

This is certainly an interesting album in that it’s just jaw-dropping for the majority of its length because of the deathly screaming, spastic instrumentals, and absolute nonsense lyrics. “I Painted My Teeth” is about a man and woman going back and forth yelling at each other to not paint their teeth as a weird sort of sequel to “You Painted Your Teeth” from Telegraph Melts. “Twelve Minutes Since February 32’nd” is about how it’s “February 32nd” and it’s the perfect time of year to murder everyone in sight. What the hell? Modern Dances definitely has the unique raw ferality of Telegraph Melts that you can’t get from any artist other than Jandek, but it’s not nearly as concise or visionary as its predecessor. Also, the instrumentals are really lacking and there's zero "groove factor" or rhythm in any of the songs. The disturbing abrasiveness and complete lack of control and editing on the album makes it just a spectacle instead of a truly enjoyable listen. 

5/10

Essential album?: No

Essential songs:

Twelve Minutes Since February 32’nd 

Nothing Is Better Than God

Spiritual Song

Open E

Jandek - The Rocks Crumble - Review

The Rocks Crumble is my least favorite Jandek album so far, but sometimes I revisit it because it’s so dissonant and messy that it’s almost at the level of “so bad it’s good”. There is certainly a humorous element because of Jandek’s nonchalant, sarcastic vocals and the spastic, chaotic, atonal guitar and drums, but from a musical standpoint, it’s pretty awful most of the time. 

The first two tracks are on acoustic guitar, and they’re pretty haunting. “Faceless” is probably the best one here with strange lyrics about someone refusing to look into his eyes. “Birthday” has the same lyrics from “Nancy Sings” and “John Plays Drums”, with basically the same instrumental as the former, but with Jandek’s less-melodic vocals. The lo-fi compression and the dusty-basement atmosphere of the songs is typical for early Jandek, but it’s still high quality. 

This is followed by 3 versions in a row of the song “European Jewel”, which combines the two lyrical parts we heard from Ready for the House and Chair Beside a Window. Unfortunately, none of them improve upon the original versions, which were already perfect to me. They sound even more careless and out-of-tune, and the added drums don’t do much except make the song sound more amateur and feel less sincere. And we have to sit through this 3 times in a row.

The rest of the album is a repetitive mess of the same song structure over and over again: completely aimless noisy electric guitar strumming and seemingly randomly, non-synchronized overdubbed drums. This sound worked a lot better on albums like Telegraph Melts because each song had a different concept and multiple vocalists, but here it just sounds like a 20 minute jumbled mess. “Message to the Clerk” is at least interesting as a lyrical blueprint for the brilliant song from On the Way, but it’s still poorly executed like the rest. Out of these later tracks, I suppose “Same Road” works at least a little bit better because the repetition is somewhat catchy. Again, the unfettered aggression and fast tempo of the songs might be cathartic if you’re looking for music that sounds really chaotic, but that still doesn’t save it from generally being very poorly written and recorded. 

The lyrics are decent, with a few memorable lines here and there, but most of it is random and silly. The lyrics mostly have an aggressive tone to fit the mood of most of the music. The rhyme scheme is mostly couplets too, which adds to the silliness slightly, and some of the rhymes are the most expected words you could pick. Of course, the lyrics are not completely irredeemable because Jandek is a very talented lyricist in general, but he can do better. 

This album might have a few redeemable things, and it’s certainly really unique and interesting, and even satisfyingly chaotic and wrong at times, but I can still tell that Jandek didn’t really care at all when he made this album. It feels like a messy collection of demos rather than a concept like most of his other albums, especially because of the “3 of the same song in a row” thing. 

4/10

Essential album?: No

Essential songs: 

Faceless

Jandek - Follow Your Footsteps - Review

 

Follow Your Footsteps is definitely one of Jandek’s most accessible albums and it’s better than I expected. It should definitely be considered a Jandek “classic”. There are some pretty complex chords and fingerpicking on here, usually in standard tuning, but it still has a very primitive and amateur quality about it, especially with typical weird Jandek vocals and lyrics. My guess is the guitarist is the same skilled blues guitarist who would follow on Blue Corpse and You Walk Alone. There is a general weirdness and improvisational vibe with strange timing and chord choices on several tracks. It’s overall very folky and haunting. 

The beginning tracks have quite a few instrumentals, or songs where the vocals are mixed so low that you can’t discern the lyrics. They were alright, but they kept the album from being perfect. The opener, “Honey”, is a decent blues instrumental with loud atonal drums. My favorite part is definitely the ending where the whole tone of the song changes to something a lot more melancholic and reminds me of “Your Other Man”. The following “What Do You Want to Sing” is essentially the same kind of song with an acoustic guitar and a very brief vocal appearance from Nancy, who doesn’t appear on the album again, and then “Jaws of Murmur” is like the same song again but with very quiet vocals from the bluesy guy. The lyrics talk of some deathly bird, but are mostly incomprehensible. 

The following middle section has some pretty sweet folky tracks where the mood is almost comforting and warm, which is certainly a first for him. I like the soft, flowing strumming on “Didn’t Ask Why” and the fingerpicking on others. “Leave All You Have” is an interesting mix of subtle, haunting dissonance and “melodic” fingerpicking. “I Know You Well” is definitely the most memorable and probably the best song on the album because of the catchy descending fingerpicked guitar and the softness of Jandek’s whispered vocals. 

“Straight Thirty Seconds”, an instrumental atonal electric song, and the following songs completely switch up the tone of the album to be something more experimental. The guitarist switches back to Jandek and the songs are atonal and slightly disturbing. I actually enjoy these as much as the rest of the album, though. “For Today” and “Collection” recall the most intense moments on Chair Beside a Window and definitely show a lot of improvement in technique and songwriting. 

The lyrics are not the strong point of this album. There is a lot of nonsense and possibly improvised lines. There might be some slightly meaningful lyrics here and there, but it definitely doesn’t show Jandek’s lyrical talent at its best. However, this album was still a huge step forward for Jandek because it’s the first one to feature the “good” guitarist and reworks the “full band” setup from Telegraph Melts to create something a little sweeter and folkier that focuses more on the lead man. It’s not as much of a profound statement as other Jandek albums might be and it’s more of a musical experiment rather than a concept, but it’s definitely an important step toward the upcoming accessible folk album Blue Corpse, which had more of a fleshed-out concept. 

7/10

Essential album?: Yes

Essential songs:

Honey

Leave All You Have

I Know You Well*

Collection

Jandek - Later On - Review

Later On, Jandek’s third album, includes some musical “improvements” relative to Ready for the House and Six and Six, but also doesn’t have a lot of what made those albums special. The recording quality is slightly improved. The guitar is more aggressive and clearer, perhaps because he is now using a pick instead of his fingers. Intense strumming moments, like the intro to “Wild Strawberries” from Six and Six, make up over half of the album here, which makes for slightly more engaging music. 

Jandek’s vocals have also changed a lot and are more engaging like the guitar. He gets really aggressive on tracks like “Your Condition” and “The Janitor”, but also brings back the wispy, broken vocals from the first 2 albums on “Don’t Know if I Care”. A few tracks feature an overdubbed harmonica, which is also played harshly and non-melodically like the guitar. It’s an interesting addition that helps the album break out of sameness and I like that it’s mixed very quietly and mysteriously on a few of the songs. 

However, Later On just doesn’t have the same disturbing, bleak ambience that the first two albums had. The soft guitar and the somewhat calming sparseness of the picking from the first two albums is only present for about half the time here, while the rest is really "angry". It’s also missing the level of lyrical brilliance that the first two albums had. There are just a few interesting stories and pictures of emotions conveyed throughout. 

“What Did I Hear” tells a story of betrayal and deception, and questions the concept of time. “So Fly, Max” is about the relatable feeling of not knowing what to do because of emotional emptiness. “The Janitor” is an angry message to a character about how he spends all day cleaning but doesn’t actually take care of himself. “Don’t Know if I Care” is about confusion at the world and not even knowing how you feel because everyone is going a different way. However, I think those 4 songs are the extent of my interest in the lyrics. The rest of the lyrics focus on simple statements or descriptions that don’t really have any significance to me, and a lot of them are really repetitive like “Your Condition” and “Just Whisper”. I can’t help but be disappointed at this in comparison to the highly sophisticated poetry/imagery/metaphors from the first two albums. 

I think Later On is just an album that sets the stage for Chair Beside a Window and the following albums. It brings in a lot of new techniques and styles for Jandek that we will hear over and over for decades to come. It was a necessary stepping stone for Jandek’s musical style, but it’s not a very interesting or profound piece of art on its own in his discography, even though it’s still enjoyable and not genuinely bad in any way. 

6/10

Essential album?: Maybe, it’s not super interesting but it at least bridges the differences between Six and Six and Chair Beside a Window. 

Essential songs:

Your Condition

The Janitor

Don’t Know if I Care

The Second End

Jandek - Telegraph Melts - Review

The next step on my Jandek journey was something completely different. I’d heard him do avant-folk, “accessible” folk, blues rock, and a few other things, but I was not prepared for the absolute cacophony and disturbing confusion that is Telegraph Melts. 

Jandek’s “noise rock band” era preceded his blues rock era and was similarly short-lived, but produced some of his most interesting and varied content. I don’t think the whole experimental band era of Jandek gets as much appreciation as it should, because I consider this album one of the “Jandek masterpieces” because of the effect it’s had on me and the amount of variety. Out of the four albums that roughly fall under this category (Interstellar Discussion, Foreign Keys, Telegraph Melts, and Modern Dances), Telegraph Melts definitely far exceeds the others. These albums primarily feature a full band performing extremely dissonant, noisy, slightly blues-inspired outsider “garage rock”. The vocalists include the same Jandek from the previous albums, a second male vocalist who sounds very similar to Jandek (easily mistaken for him) but has a different accent and a deeper tone, and a female vocalist named Nancy who we previously heard on “Nancy Sings” from Chair Beside a Window.

There were a lot of words I used to describe this album after I finished my first listen - weird, raw, dirty, intense, provocative, confusing, which all fit fine - but perhaps the most apt is “feral”. I love that the band members sound like they have no formal musical training whatsoever, but have a very precise and clear vision of what kind of art they want to make, and accomplish it perfectly because they don’t have the skills to make “perfect” music. It all comes out incredibly raw and rudimentary, and while it may sound similar to 80s No Wave bands like Sonic Youth and DNA, this has more of an untrained youthfulness to it that somehow makes it more disturbing. The singers make improvised, primal shouts, the untuned, dirty-sounding instruments stumble along, and several songs have abrupt endings. 

On the short opener “You”, the drums march quickly while the guitar jerks awkwardly and Nancy starts to sing much more wildly than she did on the primitive, hymn-like “Nancy Sings”. This sets the stage for the following “On the Planes”, a similar song, where Nancy belts an awkward yet strangely beautiful melody that somehow works over the dissonant instrumental. While she is a skilled singer, something about her voice is so familiar that she still sounds like a random girl from the deep south that got put in the band by chance. The fact that no one knows her identity makes her feel more ghostly. “Go To Bed” is more intense and disturbing, with the tempo of the song increasing and Nancy’s vocals becoming more raw as she holds long, echoing notes, and screams the title of the song by the end. 

“Ace of Diamonds” brings in a vocal performance from Jandek that is more intense than normal and very memorable. It is not far off from “Go To Bed” where the drums increase the tempo throughout the song and the vocals become louder and more fervent as Jandek screams at the top of his lungs at his poker opponent about how he’ll destroy them. The lo-fi compression and the feedback sounds make it more chaotic. “Twenty-Four” is another similar song with Jandek vocals. It rises and falls in intensity throughout. The lyrics are very dark and pessimistic and speak of the inevitability of death.

“No Slow Ones” and “Telegraph Melts” are like awkward, ill attempts at ballads that end up becoming something different and very experimental in the process. Nancy does her improvised, country-like, somewhat catchy melodies over slower, subtler instrumentals. On the title track, she sings one of Jandek’s poems that later got used on You Walk Alone, whose lyrics I have already interpreted on my review of that album. However, it’s still a unique take on the song because it’s being sung from the woman’s perspective, which includes a pronoun change. Jandek comes in toward the end of the song to sing a sort of bridge, which makes it feel like a conversation, and hints that the song may be about the relationship between the two singers. A harmonica gives the song a slight tinge of blues. 

“Governor Rhodes” departs from the formula of the previous song and introduces the alternate male vocalist who sings/chants together with Nancy. The title may refer to Ohio governor James A. Rhodes. They chant repetitively about celebrating nature and singing together and mention random names over a primal drum beat, creating something creepily cult-like. This song marks somewhat of a midpoint in the album where the content becomes a lot more intense and disturbing after this. 

“Star Up in the Sky” shows the alternate male vocalist’s ability to freak us out. His creepy voice is rebellious and youthful, and the loud mixing gives it a smothering effect. He wavers between deep droning notes and high, disturbed screams with a slight humorous tone. He sings together with Nancy, but his voice is very much overpowering in the song. A harmonica hums like a deconstructed blues song throughout. 

“You Painted Your Teeth” is the main highlight from this album and is still probably the most disturbing Jandek song, or maybe even the most disturbing thing I’ve heard from anyone. The guitar and drums randomly jerk around quietly, and then the male singer’s voice comes in and it’s piercing and loud. It launches right into intense screaming with no intro or anything, and somehow it grabs my attention and captivates me for the whole time every time I listen to it. A YouTube comment describing this as “Swans with extra chromosomes” actually describes it perfectly. The disturbing lyrics sound like they came from an alternate universe because they make no sense. The singer frenziedly yells at a woman, telling her not to paint her teeth, or else he will literally murder her. At the midpoint of the song he admits “I painted my teeth”, which just makes me think about what’s the deeper meaning behind not wanting someone to paint their teeth, but doing it to yourself anyway. 

“You’re going to go to heaven,

Everything’s going to be WHITE!

WHITE, WHITE WHITE WHITE WHITE WHITE, BABY!!!

BUT NOT YOUR TEETH!”

Nancy randomly yelps “No…” with fear at the end of the song, which aptly describes my reaction to this song. My jaw was literally on the floor. It was hard to believe that this was the work of a “band” that had to be playing together to make this music instead of this just being something from the disturbed mind of one person. That goes for this whole album, really. 

“Mothers Day Card” follows the terrifying song with something a little more lighthearted. Two male singers, or perhaps the same guy overdubbing himself, read off the lines from what sounds like a Mother’s Day card from the dollar store with a sinister and humorous tone. “The Fly” has Jandek and the other male vocalist singing together. Jandek takes the lead while the other guy mostly moans and screams morbidly in the background. The lyrics sound like nonsense but bring up themes of death again. The closer “House Up on the Hill” is a proper duet between Nancy and the second male vocalist and describes a creepy abandoned house where they go to drink. The man does more of his scary screaming, but Nancy’s repetition of “To the water” is actually pretty catchy. It’s definitely one of my favorites on this album. 

Overall, I love all the unique little flaws of this album and the confusion and disturbance that it exudes. It’s definitely one of the heaviest and most experimental albums from Jandek. I also like the amount of “theatricality” it has in comparison to other Jandek albums because of a unique picture painted with each track. The tone of the lyrics is very sinister and confused to fit the qualities of the music. The themes are less personal than previous albums to illustrate a kind of collective suffering among the performers. They sing very strange and nonsensical things, but the lyrics plus the chaotic music somehow convey the deepest, most hidden human desires for darkness, violence, and death. 

8.5/10

Essential album?: Yes

Essential tracks:

Ace of Diamonds

Go To Bed

Telegraph Melts

Governor Rhodes

You Painted Your Teeth*

House Up on the Hill

My Rating System Explained

I just realized I never took a moment to explain what the numbers I assign to music on this blog mean. I've always thought about this, but just never wrote it down, so here I will explain what each rating out of 10 means to me.

10: Perfect, very important to me, I listen to it all the time.

9: Mostly perfect songs, also important to me.

8: Mostly great songs, very impressive.

7: Mostly good songs, very enjoyable throughout.

6: Mostly good songs, but no strong feelings about it.

5: Some good parts, but not really my thing.

4: Some decent parts, but overall disappointing.

3: Mostly bad songs, very little holding it up.

2: Mostly awful songs, nearly irredeemable.

1 or 0: Completely awful, stirs up negative feelings.

This is something I think about and change all the time. For example, I think about if I can consider an album a 10 on my first listen even if I think it's perfect, because I also want to reserve my 10s for the albums that are the most personally important to me. 

I think what I have settled on here is pretty good because I can better classify the music that I like; I rarely ever dislike any music, and on most albums, I enjoy every song to some extent. Because I practically enjoy everything, I can put albums I enjoy into more specific tiers relative to each other by making a score of 7 mean "very enjoyable". This is easier than having a score of 7 meaning "average" like some other reviewers do, because otherwise practically everything would have very high scores and I wouldn't know what's better than what. 

Jandek - You Walk Alone - Review

You Walk Alone is my favorite Jandek album, and I don’t know if any of the rest will manage to top this one as I continue my Jandek listening journey because I think You Walk Alone is simply perfect from beginning to end. This album represents the artistic peak of Jandek’s short-lived blues rock era. I read one reviewer write that saying one of the Jandek blues albums was his best was like saying your favorite Picasso piece was one of the paintings from before he discovered cubism. I suppose that’s somewhat true; the album is relatively “accessible” and doesn’t resemble the vast majority of the minimalist, depressive folk music that people might say represents the “spirit” of Jandek. However, that doesn’t mean this album isn’t still uniquely experimental, mysterious, lo-fi, and made by a total outsider with an untouchable innocence. The experimentation is one thing, but I also think the songwriting, musical performance, and lyrics cover a wide range of emotions, and are some of the most convicting and powerful pieces I have ever heard. It goes without saying that other Jandek albums just don’t quite hit like this one. 

The album features “professional” electric blues guitar with at least two guitarists who are ostensibly more classically trained than Jandek. The guitar sound is loud, lo-fi, and raw. The songs are melodic, complex, and improvisational, like a conversation between the performers. The drums are the most unusual instrument on the album, and resemble earlier Jandek albums. They have a heavy, primitive, untuned sound, and keep rhythm, but in a strange childlike manner. In general, even if the musicianship on this album might feel sloppy, I think that adds to its unique atmosphere and character. On the instrumental opener “Lavender”, the drums are more like someone running fast than an actual drum beat, but something about their enveloping sound is satisfying and fits the lo-fi aesthetic of the album.

Jandek’s vocals are as good of an instrument on the album as the guitars, as this album features his best vocal work as well. He ranges from gentle whispers, to primal blues-style howling, to emotionally charged belting. He plays with the guitarists with his vocals in the same way they improvise with each other. He reaches the peaks of his intensity and volume when the guitars are at their rawest and most psychedelic. 

The second track “Time and Space” is the best of the best, and we’ll have to see if this remains my favorite Jandek song by the end of the listening challenge. The song centers on a basic catchy blues riff with a different variation of a solo at the end of each repetition. Jandek gets silly as he sings his bizarre, existential lyrics about carrying clothes in coffins and putting oranges from Florida in the closet. The drums are similar to those from “Lavender” and complement the rhythmic guitar better here. Each singing-right-in-your-ear repetition of “Ohh, time, ohhh, space” gets more intense as the guitar builds in the same way. The song is so abstractly constructed, but at the same time one of the most brilliantly structured Jandek songs. 

The following “The Cat That Walked From Shelbyville” (same lyrics as the avant-garde “For Today” from Follow Your Footsteps) takes things down a notch and presents a gentle, pleasant, folksy ballad. There are no drums and Jandek’s vocals remain soft, giving the song a sparse, restrained feel. There are once again several guitar solos throughout the song. The lyrics are as bizarre and random as the previous song and add to the abstractness of the music. However, something about the delivery makes them feel romantic regardless of what he’s actually saying. 

“Quinn Boys II” reworks the song from Blue Corpse to be a lot more interesting. The drums are more of the same weirdly satisfying primal pounding. Jandek’s vocals are a bit obnoxious in a way that I like. The song ends up being one of the weaker ones on the album, but there is one part I love when the drums slow down and then stop completely, and then one guitarist plays a beautiful, gentle riff. The other guitarist picks up on what he is doing and starts harmonizing with the melody. Jandek’s vocals get softer and sweeter and the song concludes in a satisfying way. 

On “The Way That You Act” (mostly the same lyrics as “Customary” from Interstellar Discussion), one guitar keeps a consistent catchy riff while the other acts like a duet singer with Jandek’s vocals with a solo that lasts through the whole song. I have to stress how catchy the guitar melodies are on this album because you just don’t get it very often from Jandek. He builds up into howling, echoing screams by the peak of the song. The song is so rebellious and primal. The lyrics are made up of more bizarre lines, in couplets this time, but the powerful screaming delivery somehow makes every single line feel important and memorable no matter how nonsensical they may be. “IT BURNS AND I SMOKE IT!! EATS WORMS AND I CHOKE IT!!!”

“I Know the Times” (same lyrics as “Open E” from Modern Dances) is the album’s weakest track, but it’s still fantastic by Jandek standards. The song is the only one here to feature the alternate male vocalist, the same one who sang the first few songs on Blue Corpse. His vocals are not as fervent or avant-garde as Jandek’s, but introduce a different flavor of old school blues type singing that’s still beautiful and haunting in its own way. The guitars and drums take it slow and simple here with a small build up at the end. The lyrics speak of the simple message of treasuring the finite moments we have to spend with one another in a profound, poetic way. 

The 9 minute “When the Telephone Melts” (another lyric reworking, of the title track from Telegraph Melts) is another Jandek masterpiece. The song takes the toned-down, melancholic route as a contrast to the grit of the preceding songs. The song manages to stay engaging for its length. The rhythm guitar is slightly out of tune and the primitive drums gently pound throughout the song, setting up the devastatingly bittersweet tone of the song. The lead guitar is constantly changing and finding new ways to reinforce the powerful emotion of the song, and once again works like a duet with Jandek’s vocals. The vocals are non-traditional and don’t follow any typical melodic progressions, but this song is still the best example I can give of Jandek’s genuine vocal talent. The vocals are Bob Dylan-esque because they sound careless, but are actually deliberate and quite impassioned. Jandek doesn’t harmonize with the instruments, but he sings off key in a specific way that perfectly conveys the pain and passion in his voice. 

The lyrics of “When the Telephone Melts” are the best on the album. My interpretation is that they are about a man who left a woman, and he feels conflicted about her because she would always hurt his feelings and joke about him. She may come back to him after a long time of separation, but he doesn’t know if he’ll let her stay because of how she treated him. He reminisces about how he would laugh along with her, but once he tried to get in on the joking himself, he realized they had different points of view and that it is hard to find the real her. The ending is a powerful, ambiguous line: “Well you can joke about me baby / Yeah you can say my name in vain, say my name in vain…”

The closer “War Dance” has grown on me a lot. Jandek ends the album with another punchy, rebellious cut. His vocals are mixed louder and his mouth is right on the mic, distorting his voice and giving it a humorous tone. He sings chantingly about a tribal dance, war, and animistic power. The closing lines are a memorable ending to the album. 

“Sun give us the strength to live

Wind bring our path back home

Oh moon, give us stealth

Oh moon, flow like their blood

Oh rain, flow like their blood

At the pierce of our spear

At the pierce of our spear”

You Walk Alone was one of the first blues rock albums I had listened to, and ends up being the Jandek album I revisit the most. I listened to most of the songs where the lyrics originated after I had already heard this one multiple times; I find it fascinating how Jandek reworked some of his best and more bizarre older lyrics to work within much more melodic and complex song structures, particularly the transformations of “Customary” to “The Way That You Act” and “Telegraph Melts” to “When the Telephone Melts” (both original songs are still great in their own way). Also, the amount of meaning I found in the smallest details of the guitar work on each subsequent listen certainly intrigued me to start listening to more of the blues genre. I love how this feels like the biggest, most well-executed concept Jandek ever created. 

10/10

Essential album?: Yes

Essential songs:

Time and Space*

The Cat That Walked From Shelbyville*

The Way That You Act*

Quinn Boys II

When the Telephone Melts*

War Dance