Jandek - The Humility of Pain - Review

The Humility of Pain is very similar to I Threw You Away, and I'm having a hard time deciding the score for this album because it’s almost as good, but I think I'll give it a score a little bit lower because it’s missing some of the things that made I Threw You Away great, and the lyrics aren’t as straightforward or relatable here. The vocals are still howling and despairing, like a cry for help, and the guitar is pretty much the same, but there’s less reverb on this one. There are no harmonica parts, but I do still feel that his vocal performance is very strong and makes this era a lot more interesting than some of the early acoustic records, partly because of how dramatic the vocals are and how certain words and phrases get more emphasis and become more memorable. 

The lyrics on this album feel less introspective and are more like a message to someone else. Jandek seems to be giving advice to someone to stay out of trouble on the title track, for instance. “I Want to Look In” is indecipherable, but it has a memorable verse: 

We’ll walk the spectrum

With lights on the walls

The floors are dead now

And that makes them alive

They love you so much

How could you turn away?

“I Can’t Leave a Clue” is a more optimistic song with Jandek hoping for a miracle and wanting to erase “what he did” in his past. “Share My Life” is straightforward and it’s about the protagonist searching for a soulmate. I like these lyrics a lot - some of the best on the album - although of course Jandek’s desperate delivery gives everything a different meaning. 

You’re missing somebody

You’re missing me

There’s nothing to weigh you down

I don’t have a past

Let’s make the clock disappear

There’s only one thing to see

You’re missing somebody

You’re missing me

“You Know You Need” seems to be “advice” again. I like the metaphor of cleaning out the house and taking out the things you don’t want as a representation of being your true self. The protagonist talks about his relationship with the addressee and how they should appreciate his presence more, but not saying that outright. Certain details, like a friend that he’d die for, are mentioned. It feels very personal; it reminds me of my lyrics in that way, in that it’s ultra specific about a person, but vague enough that someone who doesn’t know about the situation can’t exactly interpret it spot-on. It’s true that a lot of Jandek lyrics feel like something that’s too personal to be listened to. Although, I'm not sure how I feel about “the refrigerator is dead and gone” as a closing line. Maybe it’s genius?

While there are plenty of great moments on this album, it overall doesn’t measure up to its predecessor I Threw You Away in terms of lyrics, memorable moments, and musicality, but it’s certainly still a pretty great Jandek album and I guess I'm looking forward to what this era brings next. 

7/10

Essential album?: No

Essential songs:

Share My Life

Jandek - I Threw You Away - Review

Finally, a musical album again. I Threw You Away is a solo acoustic effort, but it’s unlike anything I've heard before from Jandek. The guitar playing is in an alternate tuning with not a lot of variety, but the playing is intense and rhythmic with a lot of dramatic pauses. There is also quite a lot of reverb on the guitar and the vocals, giving the whole album a very spacious vibe, as if you’re far away from Jandek in a large room. A harmonica comes in about halfway through the album, and it’s about as key-less as his guitar playing. I don’t know if it’s any more dissonant or hopeless than past Jandek harmonica playing, but it feels like that to me. 

Finally, the most notable and perhaps the best aspect of this album is Jandek’s vocals. His voice has changed A LOT from the last time we heard him sing. It’s nearly unrecognizable, but after listening to the spoken word albums, it’s believable that it’s the same person. I’ll miss his old voice, but there’s a lot to like about the new kind of vocals here too. Jandek simply HOWLS nearly every line in such a despairing tone. The repetitions of “black” on “Blues Turned Black” is the best example of this; I can’t help but think of “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” by Patty Waters when I hear it. 

The lyrics on this album are great too. They are starkly and unabashedly depressed, lonely, and painful. They’re difficult to read; they reference self-harm and numbness of feeling. On “Frozen Beauty”, he mourns the death of a loved one, although lines such as “I took your life / Put it in a box” suggest he has something to do with their death. “The World Stops” is less depressing and describes a trip back to familiarity, where one can finally experience quiet calmness. It’s a satisfying ending to the lyrical themes. The songs on this album are samey, but it’s overall a good experience and certainly surpasses much of his early acoustic material. 

8/10

Essential album?: Yes

Essential songs:

Blues Turned Black*

Jandek - Worthless Recluse - Review

 Another spoken word album, but Worthless Recluse is a little bit different. The tone is overall very different, both figuratively and audibly. The delivery is very serious and mostly monotone, and at times sounds like a genuine conversation or an audiobook, really, instead of the poetic, sing-songy delivery from the previous 2 albums. I’m also glad that there’s nothing like “I Need Your Life” or those half hour songs here; the songs don’t drag on at all and there’s barely any monotonous repetition (if any at all), which means they explore their topics much more concisely yet deeply. I also feel like the short stories were more snappy, realistic, and easier to follow than the ones on This Narrow Road. 

The lyrics are overall very depressing and I feel like it goes without saying that they’re lonely. “Out of the Cave”, with its imagery of the city scenery and Jandek’s story of travelling which includes having “slept in a parked bus”, makes me think Jandek has experienced being homeless before. 

“Interlude” introduces another character that the protagonist has a complicated relationship with, who doesn’t seem to want to notice him.

I love “Aimless Breeze” and its message of the fleeting nature of time, which can’t be organized in the way we do. 

“I know the sun will come and go again

The moon and stars will shine

Why should I not notice?

I don’t know

Time seems so capsulized

Drifting in an aimless breeze

Like the fallen leaves

Like wood out on the lake”

“You Wake Up Deadmen” describes the other character “collecting” dead men in a trash barrel through sex and refuses to acknowledge the protagonist. It hurts to read about. 

“Worthless Recluse” is the 17 minute centerpiece of the album and is about the protagonist trying to understand if there is happiness, if there is something worth it about going outside in the world and embracing money and material possessions. He even hates going to the supermarket to get food to eat, and having to eat feels like a “weakness”. He describes a dream that’s more interesting than life, and getting caught up with the cops whenever he goes outside. The theme of time reappears where he doesn’t want to keep up with the schedules of life: “I wanna be where no time is the wrong time”. Jandek spews self-hatred, but declares he’s not strong enough to kill himself or disappear. He’s stuck in a dream, and feels like he’s “supernatural”, despite a “human” part of him that wants money and possessions. The song ends with him describing how all he cares about is “taking the big step into God’s eye”. The song is simply a masterpiece full of profound wisdom. 

Fans gave this album the most praise out of the spoken word albums, and I have to say my expectations were about met. I think the title track especially, and most of the others, are strikingly beautiful, albeit having little replay value. I know I said something in the last review about spoken word not being enjoyable to listen to, but this one is different because Jandek is no longer doing that weird, silly, stretched-out delivery that makes me uncomfortable (for the most part; he does it a little on the last tracks here), so I think his voice was significantly more calming to listen to here. I might listen to it again because the lyrics really require your whole attention and you have to read them as you listen.

8/10

Essential album?: Yes

Essential songs:

Worthless Recluse

Jandek - This Narrow Road - Review

Another spoken word album. I don’t really want to go into that much detail because there’s a LOT to unpack with the lyrics and I don’t think I could possibly comprehend all of This Narrow Road after one passive listen. The first song “One Last Chance” is half an hour long and is basically the same pattern as PMDOTP. I feel like it also has a lot of the same themes. The song is about how badly Jandek wants to be good and he’s talking to someone who can help give him strength to defeat the bad. He doesn’t really get that into what good and bad means, and the whole thing has a sarcastic tone. While it can be interpreted as a sort of prayer that Jandek made for himself to become a better person, it also feels like a satire on the way that the world and the media perpetuate the idea that we have to be good people and destroy the bad in ourselves when everything doesn’t really have a clear-cut definition of good or bad and sometimes following the rules isn’t the right thing to do. I believe Jandek touched on this too by mentioning that the idea of good can be different from person to person. However, this song is far from perfect because the sarcasm’s effect definitely wore off after 30 times of Jandek saying some variation of “I wanna be good, I wanna defeat the bad”. 

The rest of the album has much shorter tracks, and it’s a huge improvement from the last album - the imagery is much more complex, and there is less repetition. It’s less talking and more straight up poetry, similar to Jandek’s early lyrics. As I said, I can’t possibly comprehend all this poetry, but “The Name I Had”, “Pieces of Place”, “Ten O'Clock Shadows”, and “I Knew About Them” are all highlights. However, they weren’t nearly as easy to follow as the 20+ minute songs because their stories and imagery progressed a lot faster. I don’t want to say they should be longer, because the 20+ minute songs are really hard to sit through, but perhaps they don’t explore their topics enough to digest easily. But then again, who said it has to be easy to digest; I'm just being dumb right now. I definitely need to spend some time to read through it again and pick out my favorite lines.

Jandek’s delivery throughout the album is almost always sing-songy, but not enough to sound the same as his voice when he’s actually singing. I appreciate that there’s some kind of melody sometimes, but honestly it’s a 56 minute spoken word album without accompaniment, of course it’s extremely inaccessible and difficult to sit through. I know you could argue that it’s essentially the same thing as Ready for the House and Six and Six, which I gave positive scores to, but at least those have guitar and pseudo-singing and they have a little replay value. There are things I love about the lyrics on This Narrow Road, but I can’t give it anything higher than a 6 with my whole chest because while it’s artistic, it’s simply not genuinely enjoyable to listen to. I don’t know if I'll ever listen to it all the way through again, I'm just going to read the lyrics. I think that means it’s not good music. 

6/10

Essential album?: No

Jandek - Put My Dream on This Planet - Review

Well, we finally made it here: Put My Dream on This Planet. Jandek’s music has completely deteriorated to being just spoken word, without accompaniment, and the two main tracks are over 20 minutes long. It’s really hard to come up with a rating for this because it’s hard to tell how much I actually enjoyed this. I was honestly a little bit disappointed with it, because a lot of people left really positive reviews on how enlightening, engaging, and humorous this could be, but I truly think Jandek has done better poems before. I didn’t laugh once throughout the whole thing either, or find it funny at all really. Jandek does do some really weird voices and strange inflections, but they just weird me out if anything instead of making me laugh. The themes throughout the two main songs can get extremely repetitive. 

“I Need Your Life” is about the narrator being lonely, slipping and suffering, and begging the addressee, the object of his affections, to give him their life, and let him “win” because he’s fixated on being a good person. It’s an interesting story, and the repeated phrases have a similar rhythm, creating a “chorus” of sorts (“give me your life”, “let me up”, “let me win”), but it seriously doesn’t do much for its 28 minute run time. Of course, there are great moments, and the overall message can be powerful, but I feel like the individual moments don’t even measure up to Jandek’s greatest lines and many of the moments are just plain stupid. 

Next, “It’s Your House” is about Jandek describing his dream house in great detail, down to the materials he wants to build it with, and repeatedly stating he’s “ready for the house”. It sure was interesting to get a reference to his very first album, but I cringed almost every time he said it because he dragged every syllable out to an unnecessary degree. He declares that the addressee has the power to let him live in his house and that “it’s your house” and that even if they don’t let him, he’ll live in it with his mind. I suppose I liked this track more than the first one because it feels like he’s come full circle and he’s confidently declaring his identity. It had a lot of the same problems as the first track, though, because of its extensive length, its repetitiveness, and pointless details such as the several minutes of the song dedicated to describing the materials the house is made of. 

“Since I Went Outside” is an insignificant minute-long song about going outside in the cold, and then that’s the album. I know I was negative about the poems above, but I have to say while the content of this album was frustrating, I think the whole experience of it was worthwhile. It shows a whole new side of Jandek, one that feels more mature and self-aware, yet still extremely haunting. His voice feels empty as it always does, yet confident, and I kept comparing it to his singing voice in my head. I’ve always found his voice somewhat calming, and relatable, if a voice itself can be such a thing. The silent pauses, the lo-fi quality of the recording, and the background sounds that occasionally played (sounds like rain or construction or something) could be terrifying. No one else could make such an album because no one would write about such things or deliver it in such a way, and it manages to be authentically Jandek, yet at the same time something entirely new for him. 

5.5/10

Essential album?: Maybe

Jandek - The Beginning - Review and Project Update

Okay, I think I need a big change of plans for my Jandek review project. 

First, I'm not going to post the reviews in the order that I first listened to the albums anymore. I find that I keep having to rewrite my sloppy reviews from a year ago if I actually try to go in that order. However, I have tons and tons of actually finished reviews just sitting in the vault that I want to get over with already, so I'm just going to post a bunch of those at once even if they're not in order.

Second, I unfortunately don't think my schedule is going to allow me to review every single album anymore. I will definitely still listen to all of his albums, though, so I can make some charts/guides for new Jandek fans. Also, I'll write out the lyrics for any albums that don't have lyrics online. I will definitely prioritize finishing reviews of albums that I rate at least an 8 or albums that are just generally interesting. 

Anyway, here's my review of Jandek's album The Beginning (1999). 

The Beginning definitely freshens up the repetitive album formula that we’ve been hearing for a while now. It starts with “It’s February”, which would be unremarkable in the middle of any other album, but I think it’s a perfect opener to this one, especially if you kinda know what you’re in for. “You Standing There” is a rework of the same song from New Town, and it’s much better. It’s faster and more complex, but nothing I haven’t heard before. 

The next two are more of the rhythmic, atonal plucking similar to the other albums. “Moving Slow” has an unusually dissonant ending but I don’t see it as very significant. “Falling Down Deep” was a big surprise because it’s actually melodic fingerpicking and sounds challenging to play. This is basically what I expected when I first heard that Jandek used alternate tunings (but before I actually listened to any of the songs), before I learned that he mostly just strummed with open tunings. I like how the song hints at usual melody progressions, but defies your expectations every time. Definitely one of the best on this album, and from this 90s era in general. The lyrics are about alcoholism and falling deep into depression, and it makes me sad. 

“Lonesome Bridge” has a typical guitar part, but I really enjoyed Jandek’s passionate and off-key (do these songs have a key?) vocal performance about a man who apparently chooses to be homeless. “A Dozen Drops” sounds really lo-fi and reminds me of “Down in a Mirror”. The lyrics quote 3 older Jandek songs - “Nancy Sings” (whose lyrics have been repeated a lot throughout the discography), “You’re Not Even Alive” (from Twelfth Apostle), and “God Came Between Us). The vocal delivery was a lot quieter and more timid than the original songs they came from, and feels very meaningful. The song somehow feels like Jandek’s overview of his art and, well, his memories (he really pours his whole self out into these songs) before he goes completely insane on what follows. The song goes on for a few minutes as an instrumental, which isn’t that interesting, but a little bittersweet in that it’s the last Jandek guitar plucking we’ll hear for a while.

Finally, we get to the last song, the title track, 15 minutes long. Jandek’s 26th album (or something, I'm not keeping count, I dunno) and he is 54 years old and he finally records himself playing piano and it sounds like a toddler trying to play a piano which has not been tuned in centuries. It actually sounds like ME trying to improvise on piano (which I do sometimes, yes) and I don’t know jack about playing piano properly. While the technique sounds untrained, the emotion within the song is very genuine. I can say that while the song may have been easy to make, I don’t think anyone else in the world could or would have made it, and it’s one of the most emotionally stirring pieces in the Jandek discography so far. The high notes feel like glass or ice, and the low notes feel like the cacophonies of hell. It can get quite disturbing or shocking at times. I did have a fun time imagining a middle aged man playing the piano so passionately and intensely, yet not knowing how to play in a trained way. I could choose to hate this song, but I'm going to choose to love it instead. And I think that’s how I'm going to feel about this album too. What a concept. 

7.8/10

Essential album?: Yes

Essential songs:

Falling Down Deep*

A Dozen Drops

The Beginning*