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