Music: CD Reviews

A rare moment with reclusive Jandek captured

Jandek: "Glasgow Sunday"
(Corwood)

The ultra-reclusive recording artist Jandek is a Texas institution: For more than 20 years, he has remained hidden from the public, releasing album after intriguing album of obtuse electric, acoustic — and for a while there, a capella — music. Jandek's sound belongs to no widely known tradition; no publicly stated theory or genre guides his hand. Some have described it as a kind of mutant folk blues; not that it observes traditional changes, but that it comes from a deeply personal place that has put him at the forefront of bedroom musicians. His atonal voice, his slashing, still-more-atonal guitar: These things are unique to our hero.

Converts think Jandek's work is one of the most important bodies of one-man-against-the-universe rant-logic. Detractors feel it's at best obscure to the point of total irrelevance, at worst inept.

After 41(!) albums, "Glasgow Sunday" is in many ways the strangest, most singular from Jandek-land: It is a live album. Meaning Jandek playing in front of other humans. Do you have any idea how strange it is hearing applause on a Jandek record? Apropos of absolutely nothing known, Jandek agreed to appear at a festival in Glasgow. No forewarning accompanied his performance, no rumor rumbled through the crowd. They looked up, and there he was. (As one person put it, "There's someone on stage impersonating Jandek ... Wait a minute!")

Joined by noted avant-garde composer Richard Youngs on bass and drummer Alexander Neilson, the man himself runs (meanders? staggers? moans?) through eight numbers, none less than six minutes in length. The massive opener "No Even Water" clocks in at more than 10. The drumming is free and complementary, the bass playing is minimal and unobtrusive (and spectacularly well-appointed on "Water"), both the better to hear Jandek's from-the-gut lament and that crashing guitar: chordless, shapeless, formless. Just waves of string-vibration and drum-tap in the vaguest of song-forms, our man and his voice, and one impossibly stunned crowd. Amazing.
— Joe Gross

Various: "Tribute to Billy Joe Shaver"
(Compadre)

Billy Joe Shaver is having quite a little year. He published an autobiography; Dan Rather did a piece on him last week for "60 Minutes II"; and a few of his closest friends and admirers produced this tribute album. Recorded live at the Paramount Theatre on Aug. 16, 2004, "Tribute" is a roundup of the usual Austin suspects: Guy Clark, Robert Earl Keen, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, Jack Ingram and Dale Watson, to name a few. The talent throws down either their own material or Shaver's. Cory Morrow contributes a surprisingly resonant version of Shaver's "Live Forever." Todd Snider pays touching tribute to his "hero for the rest of my life," then rolls out a moving version of "Waco Moon." Kelly Willis and Bruce Robison have their way with "Ride Me Down Easy." Shaver himself contributes an a capella version of "You Wouldn't Know Love," shouts of Jesus before "Try and Try Again," and closes out the album with a languid take on "Tramp on Your Street." It's as Americana as Americana gets.
— Joe Gross

Of Montreal: "The Sunlandic Twins"
(Polyvinyl)

Listening to "The Sunlandic Twins" is like downing a frosty Super Big Gulp on a hot, summer day. Those first couple swigs — ahhh — are hit-me-with-your-best-shot fun: snappy bass lines, boppin' horns, bells and keyboards a-whistling, dope drum-machine configurations, tongue-twister lyrics wrapped in school-choir harmony. The sugar is so quenching that when front man/talented phantasmagorical sketch artist Kevin Barnes says, "Let's pretend we don't exist/Let's pretend we're in Antarctica," over dublike "riddims," the following becomes an appropriate response: "Where's my ticket?"

But with all peaks come valleys. Synthetic instrumentation seemingly lifted from the "Fletch" theme song, over the refrain "And so begins begins our odyssey," signals the downward spiral of too much caffeine. The lysergic, candy-cane pop that is a trademark of this member of the Elephant 6 Collective — an Athens, Ga.-via-Ruston, La. family of musicians including Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel — gives way to techno ambiance shaped with monastic chants and unrealized verses. By now, the Super Big Gulp is slurped only because it's in the cup holder.

"The Sunlandic Twins" is Of Montreal's 13th offering in a collection of LPs and EPs (one of which features 16 tracks about "Dirty Dustin Hoffman"). It's sort of a dance album — divided into two genres — but doesn't obligate wallflowers. Per the credits, it was "produced, arranged, composed, performed, engineered and mixed by Prince," which is struck through and followed by ... "kevin barnes." Since when did Prince become the new Brian Wilson?
— Michael Hoinski

Of Montreal plays Friday at the Parish.