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