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
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