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