Jackie-O Motherfucker
Fig. 5
[Road Cone]
Rating: 9.2
In America, we have monuments instead of mythology: bright obelisks and
classical statuary erected as perpetually new in the place of the
perpetually old. This is, after all, the New World; we dedicate these
talismans against ruin across the landscape almost as if to keep history
itself at bay, to keep time from catching up with us. Underfoot are
bones and detritus, though, the debris of the little nameless events that
are excluded from American history. It's all a rather shallow grave when
you think about it.
Jackie-O Motherfucker's unprecedented Fig. 5, the group's first
CD release, presents a dim and unsettling archaeology of American music.
Released in the wake of the American century, it's the first
unapologetically brilliant piece of experimental music I've heard this
year. Somehow constructed bereft of any postmodern irony, Fig. 5
transforms a commanding grasp on the celebrated tributaries of American
music-- jazz, Appalachian folk, soul, African-American spirituals, West
coast surf-rock, Protestant hymns, Louisville post-rock, bluegrass,
electronic noise-- into an autochthonous gospel. Jackie-O Motherfucker--
two multi-instrumentalists, Tom Greenwood and Jef Brown and the cadre of
eclectic talents with whom they surround themselves-- abandoned the remix
loop jazz-fusion of their first two albums (available only as LPs) and
literally emerged from the basement and the soil with a masterpiece.
The gust-blown digital hum of the first track, "Analogue Skillet,"
underpins plucked and scraping strings, like a bow on the nervous system
itself. It's buzzing neon yielding to something like a screen-door
creaking on its rusted hinges behind wind chimes in "Native Einstein,"
a kind of front porch minimalism. There's a faint chorus of young girls
counting down in the recesses, playing Double Dutch in the road. The
strings sound like saws; the lone sax whines like an animal. The scene
is replaced by the solemn repetition of guitar twang; "Your Cells are in
Motion" is the working man's Mogwai: a funereal procession of rising guitar
and faint vocals coalescing steadily into shantytown post-rock, tarnished
but true. Labradford will spend the entirety of their career trying to
create this song and never get it right.
The choral "Go Down, Old Hannah," performed here by the Amalgamated
Everlasting Union Chorus Local #824, is a prison camp work song dating
back to the turn of the century-- a plea for sunset to end the workday.
"Amazing Grace," the slave trader John Newton's ubiquitous 1779 hymn to
God, is barely recognizable as Appalachian free jazz: steely banjos and
twittering horns that sound like bagpipes are equal parts mountain folk
and Pharoah Sanders.
The lilting "Beautiful September" provides an interlude of catchy No
Depression dream-rock. But the album's centerpiece is clearly the tribal
24-minute "Michigan Avenue Social Club," a track that sounds at times
like dismembered Gershwin, and at other times like Cul de Sac with horns.
Fig 5. fades out on the brief, chirping "Madame Curie," dissolving
into the earth from which the whole work arose.
For all its disparate strands, Fig. 5 is surprisingly cohesive,
constructing some ratcheted new sound with junk and memory rather than
laundering old sounds with the irony and veiled contempt of other
pastiche exercises. The disc itself is packaged in an oddly fascinating
die-cut cardboard folio, complete with snippets of Alan Lomax's celebrated
American ethnomusicology. Fig. 5 is slow and plodding like time
itself. This work, again, simply has no precedents. Or rather, its
precedents lie in the dusty anonymities of American musical history,
instead of the proud and touted monuments of our cultural past. Listen to
it once if you can. It is our secret national anthem.
-Brent S. Sirota