Jandek - A Kingdom He Likes - Review

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A Kingdom He Likes is Jandek’s lowest rated album on rateyourmusic.com right now, which is honestly quite an achievement considering the amount of albums he has. However, I didn’t think it was that bad at all, and I don’t think that’s just me having sympathy for this under-appreciated album (as I tend to do with a lot of other artists). It’s a similar type of album to I Threw You Away and The Humility of Pain with repetitive atonal acoustic strumming and howling vocals. I would say it’s not as good as those, but it had a few moments that shocked me or that I thought were pretty funny. 

The guitar technique had decent variation at times, but only ended up being slightly interesting. The lyrics remind me of the Staring at the Cellophane-Living in a Moon so Blue duo because of the random moments that stood out to me. The vocals are pretty decent. They’re very painful, although still nothing lives up to the voice from “Blues Turned Black” or the vocal style from the earlier Jandek albums. 

I don’t really follow “I Gave My Eternity”, but there’s a few lines I can pick out that I like. 

“I gave my eternity

Gave it away

And you can find it under your sway

Whoever calls it night is not serious enough

At night I’ve gone back to where I came from

I see my journey in a thousand ways

Take off your mask now

Reveal yourself

Come out and show me

You beautiful thing

I’ll just be me here in the space around me”

“Real Afternoons” starts with an ironic description of the refrigerator as an altar. The moment he sings “Straight and erect” has me thinking he’s listening to “Vertebrae by Vertebrae” by Bjork, but, well, this album came 3 years before Volta. “Skank, you skank” was one of the funny moments of the album and completely changes the subject of the song to telling someone to bug off.

“A Windy Time” feels like a random little ditty about a business meeting, of all things. I like the lyric “I don’t need a smoke alarm to tell me there’s a fire / And I still have the sense of smell and heat and cold”.

“Your Own Little World” was another one of the moments that stood out to me on my first listen. It describes a grotesque situation where Jandek’s house is infested with spiders and different types of mold, and how the spiders are so powerful that they practically own the house now and Jandek just submits to them. Gross, but symbolic.

“Sticks in the Marsh” is about the singer sleeping overnight in an old abandoned house and having a Thoreau moment, rejecting society to instead travel among nature. He seeks guidance from the “man sun God”, and then ends the song with a bold statement: “There is no God, God is everything / It’s all a picture we’re painting on the street”.

“No One Knows Your Name” starts with a personal commitment to getting some bad thing out of himself that’s causing him pain. The middle of the song quickly changes the subject and maybe somewhat connects to the topic but mostly looks like random imagery. I like the last line “I got my demons strangled by the throat”. Weird song. 

“It Rang Eleven Times” starts with Jandek describing having programmed his own organs to have full control over them. Then it suddenly changes to daring someone to jump off a cliff without looking down and laughing all they want. But he sings “I’ll never go with you / I’m the one that’s there”. More confusion.

Well, the lyrics aren’t that great. There are some very wacky ideas and a few profound moments scattered throughout the album, and a lot of mishmash subject matters. There definitely isn’t an overarching theme like the last 2 albums, which focused on relationships. I still think this is better than the mediocre 90s acoustic albums such as Glad to Get Away and White Box Requiem, however, just because of the general musical style of this new era. 

6/10

Essential album?: No

Essential songs:

Your Own Little World