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
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