JANDEK: Discography

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Early:

• 0739: Ready for the House (1978)
• 0740: Six and Six (1981)
• 0741: Later On (1981)
• 0742: Chair Beside a Window (1982)
• 0743: Living in a Moon So Blue (1982)
• 0744: Staring at the Cellophane (1982)
• 0745: Your Turn to Fall (1983)
• 0746: The Rocks Crumble (1983)
• 0747: Interstellar Discussion (1984)
• 0748: Nine-Thirty (1985)
• 0749: Foreign Keys (1985)
• 0750: Telegraph Melts (1986)
• 0751: Follow Your Footsteps (1986)
• 0752: Modern Dances (1987)
• 0753: Blue Corpse (1987)
• 0754: You Walk Alone (1988)
• 0755: On the Way (1988)
• 0756: The Living End (1989)
• 0757: Somebody in the Snow (1990)
• 0758: One Foot in the North (1991)
• 0759: Lost Cause (1992)

Late:

• 0760: Twelfth Apostle (1993)
• 0761: Graven Image (1994)
• 0762: Glad to Get Away (1994)
• 0763: White Box Requiem (1996)
• 0764: I Woke Up (1997)
• 0765: New Town (1998)
• 0766: The Beginning (1999)
• 0767: Put My Dream on This Planet (2000)
• 0768: This Narrow Road (2001)
• 0769: Worthless Recluse (2001)
• 0770: I Threw You Away (2002)
• 0771: The Humility of Pain (2002)
• 0772: The Place (2003)
• 0773: The Gone Wait (2003)
• 0774: Shadow of Leaves (2004)
• 0775: The End of It All (2004)
• 0776: The Door Behind (2004)
• 0777: A Kingdom He Likes (2004)
• 0778: When I Took That Train (2005)
• 0780: Raining Down Diamonds (2005)
• 0781: Khartoum (2005)
• 0782: Khartoum Variations (2006)
• 0784: What Else Does the Time Mean (2006)
• 0787: The Ruins of Adventure (2006)
• 0790: The Myth of Blue Icicles (2008)
• 0794: Skirting the Edge (2008)
• 0797: Not Hunting for Meaning (2009)
• 0799: What Was Out There Disappeared (2009)
• 0802: Canticle of Castaway (2010)
• 0805: Where Do You Go From Here (2011)

Live:

• 0779: Glasgow Sunday (recorded 2004, released 2005)
• 0783: Newcastle Sunday (recorded 2005, released 2006)
• 0785: Glasgow Monday (recorded 2005, released 2006)
• 0786: Austin Sunday (recorded 2005, released 2006)
• 0788: Manhattan Tuesday (recorded 2005, released 2007)
• 0789: Brooklyn Wednesday (recorded 2005, released 2007)
• 0791: Glasgow Friday (recorded 2005, released 2008)
• 0792: Glasgow Sunday 2005 (recorded 2005, released 2008)
• 0793: London Tuesday (recorded 2005, released 2008)
• 0795: Hasselt Saturday (recorded 2005, released 2009)
• 0796: Helsinki Saturday (recorded 2005, released 2009)
• 0798: Portland Thursday (recorded 2006, released 2009)
• 0800: Camber Sands Sunday (recorded 2006, released 2009)
• 0801: Bristol Wednesday (recorded 2006, released 2010)
• 0803: Toronto Sunday (recorded 2006, released 2010)
• 0804: Chicago Wednesday (recorded 2006, released 2010)
• 0806: Seattle Friday (recorded 2006, released 2011)

Track times for Corwoods 0739 through 0760 are from the original LP’s and are often a bit different on the CD’s.

READY FOR THE HOUSE

(LP, 1978)

(CD reissue, 1999)

(CD re-reissue, unknown date)

(CD re-re-reissue, 2005)

(LP reissue (Jackpot), 2008)

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• uncredited, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 1999. “There were plenty of significant events in 1978, (“You’re The One That I Want” by John Travolta & Olivia Newton John was quite a popular track, for example), and one of the most low-key yet significant events was the debut LP release on the Corwood Industries label out of Houston, TX. Mysteriously enough it came out under the name “The Units”, but it was obviously a singular vision and not a band. That individual would come to be more commonly known as Jandek, and a total of 28 albums have been issued on Corwood to date. In 1978 however, there was no telling what was to come. Ready For The House was a mostly acoustic guitar/vocal record, of ethereal, shambling post-blues form. It set the stage for one the most individualistic and fascinating bodies of work in contemporary music. The original LP was casually issued in a beautiful color sleeve, featuring a mundane but striking image of a living room chair & table (replicated with almost pop-art brilliance on this CD). No other information was ever offered. As it remains today. Ready For The House sounded like no other record, and it’s doubtful that more than a handful of copies were sold at the time (promotional copies sent to out radio stations and reviewers were more voluminous). A second Jandek album wouldn’t come out till 1981. By the mid-80s a wealth of documentation had occurred and the early Corwood albums became notoriously unavailable just as people were finally getting up the gumption to consider buying them. This record has been “in demand” for over a decade now and Corwood has finally caved in and reissued it proper. Find out what you’ve been missing for the last 21 years!”
• Phil Milstein, Op issue L. “Sterling Smith has created an album that is homemade in every way, and it is a joy to listen to... The Units are completely enveloped in their own musical world. It shows in Smith’s thin, strained voice, in his unusual guitar style, and in his oblique, personal lyrics. This enraptured quality is one of the strongest points of the album, and one The Units share with great primitives like 1/2 Japanese, The Shaggs, and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Here it servers as a deterrent as well as a benefit. Unlike the others mentioned, Smith’s LP just doesn’t communicate itself very effectively. We can hear the wistfulness, the lostness, the loneliness, the anger and the joy Smith fills his songs with, but we feel it in terms of sympathy, not empathy. We feel for him, not with him... The Units have come up with an original musical language. Because of this, the songs sound very similar to each other at first, but after a while they each begin to prove themselves as wholly autonomous compositions. The guitar-playing is slow, only faintly melodic, alternately rich and tinny (sometimes both at once); occasionally Smith will slam the strings in anger or in hurt or in something, and the playing is so engrossing that these abrasive moments are enough to knock the listener on her butt!... Another endearing characteristic of Ready for the House is its overwhelming amateurness. The rough-edged crudity of each touch seems almost deliberate, but it carries a sweet beauty that a more polished production would probably have softened... Another highlight is the cover itself. Jad Fairs calls it ‘one of the best covers I’ve ever seen, and I agree... it really is gorgeous... Any one of us could have made this record, and as Lester Bangs often argued, that’s half the point right there. Bring the means of production to ‘the people,’ and they will out-create the moneyfolks almost every time.”
• Eddie Flowers. Quoted at The History of Rock Music, Vol. 4 (website). “The stark, painfully exposed, untuned-acoustic blues/folk that once made for such a richly uncomfortable listening experience now sounds focused and brilliant. it’s not that the music is any less dark, or the technique any more refined than it was 22 years ago; it’s just that the world has moved closer to Jandek’s reality. The anxious beauty of isolation and doubt.”
• Brogden, Garry. Vinyl Absolution #20 (October 2002) (website). “I like to play Ready For The House just as the light is fading on the day: as it creepily gets darker, Jandek is the perfect accompaniment for making you feel that, yep, life really isn’t worth living. It’s not necessarily what he says, it’s the way he says it... The tension is palpable, like there’s a vampire in the room and you just know that you’re on the menu... But, there’s something strangely life affirming about the whole thing. That someone like this, with the ability to track down those dark corners of the brain can somehow get his art (or artifice) out there.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “The final song on the album... sounds a bit like a lost Velvet Underground demo, exhibiting a rare outside influence on his isolated world.”
• Daniel Marks, web review (full review). “Total isolation... is one of the themes of Ready for the House... particularly in the second track, ‘First You Think Your Fortune’s Lovely’. The song is about someone who does not wish be a part of the world, either because he feels he cannot, or because the world isn’t letting him... The vocals are sung and spoken. Some songs almost have a vocal melody, particularly the first two and the last tracks, but he never approaches a real ‘song’ in any definition we’re familiar with. Oddly, he always makes sure it rhymes, in a rare show of artistic effort... The single string plucking is used in a very creepy way on ‘They Told Me About You’. Jandek tunes his guitar and one chord not in a musical way, but more as an ambience. The sound of the one chord fits the feelings of sadness and isolation expressed in the lyrics... Jandek uses [the guitar] as a second voice, groaning its one, mournful ‘word’ over and over. One rule though: never touch the fretboard... One of the best of the typically boring Early Period.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “If you can hack this track [‘Naked in the Afternoon’] with no problem, you can pretty much well handle 90% of the man's voluminous catalogue. The sonic trademarks are there: the detuned at times death rattle acoustic guitar, the reverby haunted whiny voice, the banal, abstracted and often poetic lyrics... pretty much a homebrewed white boy-blues album, taking its chops (either purposefully or accidentally) from the Delta Blues via suburban Houston. In fact it's Jandek's inability to play the blues well that makes it so fucking 'authentically' Blues-like, in a sort of John Lee Hooker droney sort of way. Album closer ‘European Jewel’ has Jandek plug in an electric guitar and prove outright that he can play that lazy-hazy Lou Reed style as good as the best of ’em...”

Other commentary

• Irwin Chusid, WHRB interview, 2003. “I was given a copy of Ready for the House in 1978, I think... I was really stunned by it... I was stunned at the sheer amusicality or unmusicality or nonmusicality, the sheer emptiness of it. This was an album that started nowhere, went nowhere, and ended up nowhere... It was really like hearing a posthumous recording, a recording that was made after they had died... I had never heard anything that was so naked.”

SIX AND SIX

(LP, 1981)

(CD reissue, 2000)

(CD re-reissue, 2005)

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• Michael Huntsberger, Op issue M. “It is a sweltering afternoon in Texas. In a tiny bedroom, all windows curtained against the sun, sits a man, or a boy. He is plain, blond-haired, looks like an extra from a B Sci-Fi thriller. He holds a Sears guitar he was given as a child. The guitar has never been tuned — it may only have five strings. It is connected to a cheap amp. He plucks the strings, sometimes together, sometimes singly, and sings into an old cheap microphone. With a Dylan-like inflection, he pours the lyrics from his soul while plucking the guitar... The recording is made on an old Wollensak reel-to-reel with broken meters and no volume knob. He records 12 songs and presses them into a record... it is so deeply personal as to be profound.”
• uncredited, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 2000. “The cover features a crude black & white photobooth-style portrait of the man we’ve come to assume as the singer, depicted at his most youthful, ready to accompany the power & glory of the Jandekian muse. Upon it’s release Six And Six defined Jandek as a significant album artist (no mere one-shot), featuring some of his most mesmerizing variations of trance-blues, especially the 10-minute centerpiece, “I Knew You Would Leave”. Crucial, all round.”
• Eddie Flowers. Quoted at The History of Rock Music, Vol. 4 (website). “The approach is basically the same [as on Ready for the House] — free pick’n’strum acoustic guitar and depressed vocals — although he adds echo (natural?) to create an even denser sense of mental murk.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “A raw glimpse into the hermetic soul of Jandek through his ultra-minimal, angular trance-blues soaked with lots of spring reverb and sprinkled with his wavering vocal neuroses.”
• Daniel Marks, web review (full review). “This is one creepy record... He seems at his most desperate and lonely on this album, but he still has enough strength to write some good songs. ‘Point Judith’ is a longing reminiscence for what sounds like an old childhood summer retreat. When Jandek sings ‘You can hear the boats sailing’, you can almost feel the ghostliness of this dead resort town... On side two, Jandeks drags us kicking and screaming into his echo-drenched nightmare, and the album becomes very listless and incredibly unlistenable.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “ Jandek totally embraces the minimalist ‘Blues’ thing on Six and Six, from the Robert Johnson homage on the album cover to the springy/droney guitar plucks, but it’s his singing on this one that really gets you. Jandek talks/raps into a stoned, thousand yard-stare type reverb soaked drone, that could sound like Jim Morrison if he drank and smoked and took a little bit less acid, or Dylan if he took more. Jandek’s vocal performance on ‘Point Judith’ is the total business, he goes for a 10-minute work-out on ‘I Knew You Would Leave’, and ‘Delinquent Words’ is all psychotic menace, the sonic equivalent of Martin Sheen in Badlands.”

LATER ON

(LP, 1981)

(CD reissue, 2000)

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• Billy Kiely, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 2000. “This record, like Jandek’s first (Ready for the House), is comprised of not just basically one chord throughout, but as far as I can tell he barely even touches the fret board of his guitar, using his instrument more for atmosphere and percussion than anything like a ‘song’. The usual lyrical motifs of the blues are all over the place, including women, roads, death, and even janitors, which in my tweaked view of the universe hearkens back to Howlin’ Wolf’s paean to a custodian on his last record ca. 1972 (‘Watergate Blues’), and much like the Loren Mazzacane Connors Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations Vols 1–9 1979–1980 box set reissue on Ecstatic Yod, this is proof that something that might be called the blues can be non-formulaic, just undiluted expression, and actually just a skeleton on which to drape a very whacked universe of your very own.”
• John Foster, Op issue N. “Personal songs... by... a hopeless amateur whose limited, rather unique guitar-playing tends to meld with his whispery vocals, taking on a trancelike ambience. For sheer tunelessness only Kenneth Higney’s Attic Demonstration comes to mind... you really have to force yourself to concentrate on it.”
• Eddie Flowers. Quoted at The History of Rock Music, Vol. 4 (website). “Some highlights: “Your Condition” is like Roky Erickson trying to remember a dylan song during a rest-hospital breakdown; the accusatory “What Did I Hear” blues with its shattered lyrics (“I guess there’s no such thing as today/ or any day”); rockin’ on “Just Whisper” like a detuned Lou Reed playing “I’m Waiting For the Man” in his sleep; the finger-pluckin’ “Until Then,” rough personal emotional, ripped straight from the heart of pre-WWII country blues; Jandek feeling out the lyrics in a jazz-like way on “So Fly, Max”; pleading for understanding from a doubtful God on “Don’t Know If I Care” and finding a surprisingly pleasant drone for a moment (but only a moment).”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “Later On is his second [sic] album of lithium-soaked folk; a pseudo-jangle on the guitar barely carrying a tune and daydreaming poetry crooned with a creepier voice-crack than Will Oldham could ever conjur. The mysteries of Jandek, personal and musical, may never be fully revealed, but his peculiar genius is highly recommended none the less.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “Jandek start to experiment with his ‘sound’... The album finds Jandek shifting moods in bi-polar frequency, and also finds him starting to attack the guitar rather than play. You can actually hear some of the tracks start to fall apart, offering some sweet respite with the beautiful ‘Jessica’ and ‘Jackson’s Gone Down the Mississippi’, only to fuck it all up with closer ‘The Second End’ that features the plunky, grating sound that will become more prevalent later in Jandek’s ‘career.’”

CHAIR BESIDE A WINDOW

(LP, 1982)

(CD reissue, 2000)

(CD re-reissue, 2005)

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• uncredited, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 2000. “Notable for the track “Nancy Sings” which features the first appearance by an outside vocalist on a Jandek record — an absolutely riveting acoustic gospel-blues tinged track.”
• Eddie Flowers. Quoted at The History of Rock Music, Vol. 4 (website). “The echo-drenched journey into Jandek’s world begins with “Down in a Mirror”, the artist delicately plucking his free-tuned guitar and tappin’ shoes on the floor ’neath him. And then electricity! Jandek’s first electric-guitar piece, “European Jewel,” comes screamin’ in like Elmore James having a seizure. Pounding drums and bass enter for a frenzied attack not too far from the same thing Sonic Youth was doing in NYC at the same time. Back to acoustic guitar for “Unconditional Authority,” a depressed semi-boogie, and near perfect blend of solo Syd Barrett and John Lee Hooker at his loneliest. “Poor Boy” comes mighty close to early blues in lyric and open-strum structure, with none of the self-conscious posturing of most white “bluesmen”. “You Think You Know How to Score” is harmonica-holder Dylan with the Holy Modal Rounders shootin’ speed in his butt: scary but hard not to watch and chuckle as head collides with concrete. “Nancy Sings” introduces the first of Jandek’s usually anonymous female vocal collaborators — and it’s a fragile, beautiful thing. Back to electric for “No Break”, with nancy on vocals, and a drummer (Nancy?) rattling about. This fragmented non-song could be a mellow-mood Harry Pussy jam from a decade later... This ’un’s a classic Jandek album — highly recommended.”
• Daniel Marks, web review (full review). “This my favorite album of Jandek’s early period, combining just the right sense of depression, mysteriousness, and spirituality that makes Jandek’s work in this time so intriguing... His guitar tuning has changed since Ready but it still comes nowhere near standard, or even any of the typical aberrant tunings, like E or D... The second track, ‘European Jewel’, sends a blast of electric into your ears... Jandek and his band stumble through a screaming version of the familiar ‘European Jewel’ riff before he sings the last part of the song, starting with the verse he never completed... [then] the band goes out in full improv mode for another three minutes... Bassist John even has a solo, walking up the fretboard in almost perfect time... Jandek brings us his most beautiful song on track six, appropriately titled ‘Nancy Sings’. While he plucks slowly one note at a time on guitar, angel-voiced Nancy sings poetic lyrics about nature... Evidently from track nine, ‘Blue Blister’, Jandek is a smoker, which explain why his voice gets so much heavier as time goes on (check out one of the spoken word albums to see what I mean). On track eleven, ‘Love, Love’, agent Smith shares with us some wisdom he’s gained from his travel... I swear my minister gave the same sermon once.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “The album kicks off with another classic haunted track... in which you can hear some weird almost freeform electronic tape hiss (?!) and Jandek's foot stomp, that also seems to have been accidentally fractalized into something greater than its parts by shitty technology. Then everything fucking EXPLODES and IMPLODES in Dylan-Live-1966-bootleg-proportions on ‘European Jewel’, featuring the funniest Rick Danko-meets-Mingus bass impersonation ever put onto tape! Jandek's guitar playing is getting choppier and more manic on this record until the freak-folk classic ‘Nancy Sings’ comes out of fucking nowhere for no reason causing time to momentarily stop — amazing what a woman's touch can do! The rest of the album noodles around aimlessly for a bit, but is no less ‘exploratory’, with some nice, frustrated steel-string buzz/drone on trax like ‘Blue Blister’ (speaks for itself really). It's interesting to note that despite the record being the most 'fractured' of his albums so far, Jandek's tapping foot is heard on nearly all tracks, proving there is some method to the meshigarse!”

LIVING IN A MOON SO BLUE

(LP, 1982)

(CD reissue, 2000)

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• John DeAngelis, Op issue S. “Jandek plays acoustic guitar — seemingly without any formal chordal knowledge — and sings in a drifty, sometimes eerie voice that suggests he listened to a lot of obscure psychedelic music, and maybe some Doors and acoustic Neil Young, too. Over the course of a three-minute song, not a lot of lyrical or musical development takes place; you might find this hard to sit through...”
• Christopher Stigliano, Op issue T, pg. 71. “Yet again... another LP of atonal guitar with moaning vocals that remind me of the delta blues played by a member of the Godz... Totally incomprehensible and grating on the nerves... Who says that art has to be pretty anyway?”
• Billy Kiely, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 2000. “The title for this one actually comes from a lyric from his track ‘Can I See Your Clock’ from his second LP Six And Six, and so one can already see The Artist creating an oeuvre filled with allusions, hints, motifs that really don’t point at anything in particular. Herein lies one of Jandek’s peculiar charms: his songs’ resilience. We find him in a more ‘aggressive’ mode here — singing and playing here like he really ‘means it’; therein lies another charm: we are never really sure what he means. All in all, Living in a Moon So Blue is one of his best, the presentation and approach seemingly from a different time altogether, how about some grayish Eastern Bloc country, ca. 1962?”
• Eddie Flowers. Quoted at The History of Rock Music, Vol. 4 (website). “The mood is kinda upbeat, and the playing is particularly assertive (still “untuned” and moving freely, though). There are songs about “Gretchen” and “Alexandria Knows” (with harmonica that starts like a squealing synth)... One of the best Jandek albums.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “This is where Jandek's stuff gets really ‘difficult’ and damaged... Lots of pissed-off down strokes, tracks that build into blister-inducing dirges and just some seriously fucked up mess all around. The album feels like a series of sketches that Jandek just bashed out quite quickly...”

STARING AT THE CELLOPHANE

(LP, 1982)

(CD reissue, 2000)

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• Calvin Johnson, Op issue U, pg 60. “...ghost town music... Spooky, personal, honest, it fills the room, sets the moods. I return to Jandek, feel compelled to place Staring at the Cellophane or Six and Six on the turntable...”
• Eddie Flowers. Quoted at The History of Rock Music, Vol. 4 (website). “The focus here is on a very singular mid-tempo acoustic-guitar sound, with special attention to finger pickin’. The instrumental “This Is For You” and semi-instrumental “Basic Themes” (just a bit of wordless vocalizing at the end) stand out, and even most of the other pieces seem more concerned with the guitar than Jandek’s usual depressed lyrical statements. The big exceptions are the muted hard-strum violence of “Sound I”, which is mostly instrumental but quite different from the melancholy plucked-string approach; and a weird history lesson called “Nepoleon in Russia” [sic].”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “The cover of Jandek’s sixth album... is nearly identical to Living In A Moon So Blue. Furthermore, the open chord guitar pick & strum barely structuring the vocal wisp and waver from Jandek is nearly indistinguishable on these two albums. It may be a bold question to ask, but is the content from Jandek’s faded photographs to be seen as indicative of what can be found inside?”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “The downward spiral continues... Maybe Jandek was deconstructing his work in order to take his next artistic step...”

YOUR TURN TO FALL

(LP, 1983)

(CD reissue, 2001)

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• GK, Op issue X. “He continues to moan like a modern Robert Johnson type... A dark, suicidal void.”
• Eddie Flowers. Quoted at The History of Rock Music, Vol. 4 (website). “‘Typical’ all-acoustic early-80s Jandek, which means it was produced in the cold-sun heat of a state knowable only to the artist himself. Some highlights: the hard-picked philosophy of “Elementary Talk”; drummer John pounding freely on “John Plays Drums” with Jandek strumming violently and shouting to be heard (he makes it); the droney psych-folk on “Dance of Death”... “If Your Fortune Fails You” full of Dylan-pathos; the claustrophobic closer, “They Knew My Game,” with distorted mouth-on-mic vocals and what sounds like a dying music box in the background.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “While Your Turn To Fall is not as good as Blue Corpse or Ready For the House it stands as one of the stronger, more musical outings for one of the great outsider musicians this world has gotten the chance to hear.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “[The] desk, guitar case and couch... fit in PERFECTLY with Jandek's suburban-blues aesthetic... I can only take about 20 seconds of the retarded, over-loud, un-rhythmic drumming on [‘John Plays Drums’]... ‘Dance of Death’ features a really nice vocal performance. When Jandek sings well, he's pretty darn good in an Alan Vega echoey sort of way.”

THE ROCKS CRUMBLE

(LP, 1983)

(CD reissue, 2001)

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• Ira Hankin, Op issue W (May/June 1984). “There is a change of direction on Jandek’s eighth and latest album. The heart-splitting inspiration is still ripe in every song; the tasteful but non-musical acoustic guitar still present, although now over half the songs also contain hard-hitting non-rhythmic drumming. Also on a few of the songs Jandek plays electric guitar... With all the racket of the smashing drums and chordless electric guitar work it is even harder to understand the vocals...”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “Regardless of the factuality of who John the drummer is, he is prominently featured on The Rocks Crumble with a plodding arrhythmic stumble across the drum kit. Jandek’s guitar strum is an agitated jangle that meanders near blues based chords, but he breaks up all the note patterns to keep them from achieving big blues melodies. Thus Jandek’s guitar with all of its quick tempo and deconstructed melodies create an anxious haze of half-remembered songs and phrases.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “You could call this Jandek's ‘covers album’, as half of the tracks on this are covers of his previous work. It's interesting to note that a lot of his recordings during the experimental ‘Brown period’ seem to have been made at different times, so you get quite extreme stylistic and performance jumps from track... ‘Rock’ seems to be the operative word on this rec, and Jandek writes his closest thing to an anthem, ‘Message to the Clerk’... Remember this is ‘rock’ on Jandek's terms, not yours or mine or anyone else on the planet for that matter.”

INTERSTELLAR DISCUSSION

(LP, 1984)

(CD reissue, 2001)

(CD re-reissue, 2006)

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• Pennie Stasik, Op issue Y, pg. 74. “I loved the way you could almost hear the songs oozing through the needle and out of the speakers onto the floor... glorious lo-fi tribalism (a one-person tribe, at that)... May he never tune his guitar.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “Jandek and the drummer ‘John’ (which of course could just be Jandek) are making a huge freeform mess of spastically hammered percussion, overblown harmonica solos, and a Jandek who is at the most hyperactive pole of the manic-depressive spectrum. The album is a collection of almost tribal, but mostly undefined freak-outs that are much more on par with The No Neck Blues Band than his signature of pained strum and whine. Pretty weird even for Jandek’s standards.”
• Brogden, Garry. Vinyl Absolution #20 (October 2002) (website). “Jandek sounds like he’s locked in a cellar with some musical instruments and he’s pissed off about it... There’s ‘drums’ of a sort, though a bit like Mo Tucker, they don’t so much keep the beat as corral it into a corner and whack it over the head with a lead pipe; it’s a bored three year old with a wooden spoon and a tumble dryer. His [guitar] playing — even over all these years — stubbornly refuses to improve... every so often, you need to be reminded of the depths of the human psyche, and listening to this racket affirms that.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “Party starts off with Jandek in primal-energy mode, replete with oonga-boonga drums, his choppy electric guitar and howls — it almost sounds like Bo Diddley. The first half of the album features more of a ‘band’ set-up than those preceding... [and] has a very manic, ferocious, free-form, electrified style... Then, from ‘The Spirit’ the mood changes back to Jandek's trademark ghostly solo style.”

NINE-THIRTY

(LP, 1985)

(CD reissue, 2001)

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• Richie Unterberger, OPtion issue D2, pg. ???. “...with that trademark out-of-tune guitar that owes equal debts to Texas blues and the background music you hear in a lot of Asian restaurants... his phrasing is better than ever... I also dug the lyrical swipes from Jimmy Reed’s ‘Honest I Do’ in ‘Faye’... Even us fans concede that the same out-of-tune chord he uses 90% of the time gets a little wearing.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “After the raucous squalor of Interstellar Discussion, [this] is certainly his come-down record. It’s always difficult to tell how much of the Jandek oeuvre is the result of a psychological problem and how much is consciously constructed aesthetics. So in saying that this is a come-down record could be the result of either or both. Jandek’s voice is hushed, his guitar plucks quieter, and the drums untouched.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “Jandek returns to his lazy-solo-acoustic blues style... though he might have been listening to more Dylan stuff around this time (or Tom Petty as he said in his legendary interview from around this time). ‘Voices in the Dark’ and ‘This Is a Death Dream’ are two of his most bone-chilling, psychologically frightening tracks. Album closer ‘Oh Jenny’ is more sorrowful, suburban blues that ends abruptly like a Monte Hellman movie.”

FOREIGN KEYS

(LP, 1985)

(CD reissue, 2002)

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• uncredited, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 2002. “More singing from “Nancy” and beautiful atmosphere permeates all over the place.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “Here, Jandek has figured out a couple of standard blues progressions, but it’s rare to find him actually following any of them. His guitar playing remains an angular proposition, manically stabbing at notes then plaintively bending them. The percussion likewise is an erratic skitter across his drum kit, occasionally keeping time, but usually complementing the guitar splutter and his emotionally cracked voice. “Nancy”... takes up vocal duties on a couple tracks, with her comparatively commanding Patsy Cline / Tammy Wynette voice over Jandek’s instrumentation.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “‘Coming Quiet’ finds Jandek trying to do some sort of surf/noir instrumental, before losing patience and making the whole thing fall into a frustrated heap. Guest vocalist Nancy returns with her female touch. She sounds more ‘assertive’ or angry on this album... ‘Ballad of Robert’ is one of the most unglamorous, accurate, and realistic odes to serious mental illness ever committed to record...”

TELEGRAPH MELTS

(LP, 1986)

(CD reissue, 2002)

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• Art Black, Away From the Pulsebeat Winter 1987. “Jandek lives next door to someone far away, someplace where ‘music’ is an expression of emotion and not a packaged entertainment; made for self, rather than for an audience... There’s some sorta feeling trapped in the sound that I like to bask in.”
• Brooke Hinton, Sound Choice #6 (1987). “It sounds like this: a drummer, a guitarist, and two singers, none of whom have played or sung before but have a clear idea of what they want to do, are in someone’s garage banging and moaning and screeching away... it works, though I can’t figure out why. I get the impression that part of Jandek’s purpose is to confuse people. The album is absolutely ridiculous but I can’t stop listening to it... the muddy, distorted sound quality draws the listener into Jandek’s very strange world and MAKES him/her try to understand...”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “While firmly entrenched in the ‘classic’ Jandek sound of open-chord guitar pluckery and vocals that teeter on the brink of losing what little grip of sanity was there, this album stands out for a surprisingly consistent rhythmic attack on the first six tracks. Jandek hammers at his abused drumkit with locomotive rigor and intensity rarely heard in any of the previous recordings; of course, he inevitably loses control of the rhythm and sends it tumbling down the stairs. The rest of the tracks are far more loose in the rhythmic structure. Again, the woman who may be known as Nancy sings on a couple of tracks: one of which finds her sounding more like Jandek with a strained, atonal vibrato. Towards the end of the album, there are a couple of tracks in which a third male voice appears.”
• uncredited, CMJ #92, May 1986. “Since the early ’80s this Houston recluse has been quietly releasing two or three albums a year of his despairing moans, groans and words of discontent, all set to a skeletal accompaniment of hesitant guitar, squeaky harmonica and a muffled drum beat that would do any toddler with a pot proud. Sometimes he’s joined by a sweet-throated lady (imagine Melanie trapped in hell) who adds a fresh touch of the near-normal to ‘Telegraph Melts’ and ‘Governor Rhodes,’ but Jandek’s upsetting wails on ‘Don’t Paint Your Teeth’ and ‘Mother’s Day Card’ (from Norman Bates, maybe) are more typical. Jandek is an acquired taste...”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “This was the first Jandek album I actually ‘heard’ after reading about him for so long. Not a good place to start. Listening to it now, and being a fan, I can appreciate it... ‘Governor Rhodes’ sounds like some weird hippy love-in crap, with Nancy and what sounds like Jandek or a guy he met down at the pub, going on about peace and love... ‘You Painted Your Teeth’ remains an utterly LSD/PCP damaged horror movie nightmare...”

FOLLOW YOUR FOOTSTEPS

(LP, 1986)

(CD reissue, 2002)

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• Byron Coley, Forced Exposure #12. “A song like ‘For Today’, w/ its sparsely-plunked notes and melancholically assertive vocals, could almost be an out-take from one of Michael Hurley’s classic albums on Raccoon... As the soul of individualism is being destroyed by the forces of evil, Jandek’s flame is an especially bright beacon in the dark.”
• Lawrence Talbot, Sound Choice #8 (1987) “The solo numbers with acoustic 12-string and intense vocals are hard to top, but the drum-guitar duo that starts the first side has its own kind of ambience that is also priceless. What we have here is a record but more than that, part of a career that comes to us almost rolled up in a time capsule. It is about only itself and makes everything else irrelevant.”
• Art Black, Away From the Pulsebeat #? (1988?). “The most song-oriented Jandek yet, with genuine rhythms & strums, percussion so minimal as to be near nonexistent, a rare second guitar or vocals. Sorta like Phil Spector’s worst nightmare.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “While the last couple of recordings demonstrated a celebratory silliness... [this] exhibits greater tendencies towards introspection and musical isolation... what is most striking about this album is the genuine blues stucturalism of the guitar chords. Melody, even if it’s just two chords rhythmically strummed on an acoustic guitar, has become an important element in Jandek’s oeuvre. Of course, the songs utter the mythologically oblique imagery of preachers, time, reality, and nature — all typical of Jandek’s epistemological inquiries. It’s a cold world where Jandek lives.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “The opening chords of ‘Honey’ represent a kinder, gentler Jandek. The jangly, tuneful chords almost sounding like an English C86 indie band before the drums come in and drown out EVERYTHING... this album points to the beginning of Jandek perfecting a more ‘melodic’ and ‘cohesive’ type of space-blues-folk that can easily appeal to ‘indie’ or ‘pop’ ears.”

MODERN DANCES

(LP, 1987)

(CD reissue, 2002)

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• Jimmy Johnson, Forced Exposure #12. “It’s tempting to ‘genericize’ these reviews of Sir Jandek: LP #14, eleven songs, B&W cover (I think I’m up for another color job), etc., but there’s enough new excitement here to keep me going for a lifetime.”
• Art Black, Away From the Pulsebeat #? (1988?). “Almost a comedy album, and certainly a lot fuller, noisier [than Blue Corpse]. Slow and desperately filthy rusty percussive beats, electric guitar played by 2 rats fighting, making up, and fucking on the fretboard, noisy fuzzyhowl male vocals joined by that anonymous femme and yet another he-throat in places...”
• uncredited, CMJ #125, August 1987. “By definition, the most alternative thing one can do is something that very few people can actually appreciate — the more alternative it is, the more completely it deviates from the norm. Thus a completely alternative record would be one which no one ever listened to... there are records with an ideological base that approaches this concept of an ‘absolute alternative,’ which are produced for and of themselves, devoid of any interest in accessibility on even the most marginal levels... By our reckoning Modern Dances is Jandek’s twenty-third project, each with its own particular version of his vocal screeches, screams and groans, plodding percussion, disjointed guitar and unique song structure; this one features a mysterious, evocative female guest vocalist, a first for Jandek.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “This album showcases two sides to Jandek — the comedically emphatic avant-blues from the “Jandek band” (with vocal appearances from the woman known as Nancy and the intrusion of percussive splutter which may be indicative of a third party) and the solitary arrangements for Jandek and his guitar. The former is a deliberate slop of off-kilter blues progressions, the aforementioned arrhythmic drums, and oblique duets between Jandek and Nancy... If Pussy Galore took themselves seriously instead of jokingly posturing through ill-tempered blues, it might have sounded something like this side of Jandek. The latter is what most people think of Jandek — open chords aimlessly plucked and strummed while his fragile voice cracks in the construction of a painfully sad mood.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “Jandek tries out different versions of his psycho-classic ‘Painted My Teeth’. Here he duets with Nancy in what sounds like one of those Rowland S. Howard/Lydia Lunch junky-goth duets. Nancy appears on a lot of tracks here, the two of them yelling and hollering and each other, especially on the clanging opus ‘I Want to Know Why’ in which Nancy and Jandek keep asking each other ‘why?’ Then its back to one-man mope-mode to balance things out for the last three tracks...”

BLUE CORPSE

(LP, 1987)

(CD reissue, 2002)

(CD re-reissue, 2005)

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• Art Black, Away From the Pulsebeat #? (1988?). “Dead minimal Blues, morose & melancholy... with ‘Harmonica’ a sad & lost solo on that instrument for most of its 5 minutes, before the distant guitar and, well, something else join in.”
• Jane Sears, Reflex 4/1988. “This newer album contains more folk sounds and less of the dissonance Jandek is so well known for... Jandek’s angst-ridden vocals... filled with trials and tribulations...”
• Richie Unterberger, Option, April 1998. “This ain’t exactly tuneful in the Goffin-King sense... but it is his most accessible. The trademark disconnected barren landscapes still flit through his lyrics, and the vocals are still anguished, though in a soft moaning way rather than the blood-curdling manic half-scream that he’s also been known to favor. Instead of flailing about on an untuned guitar, he now sticks almost exclusively to conventional, non-dissonant chords, usually with a folky strum that echoes down-home blues and early 70’s acoustic Neil Young... which is not to say that yer average listener won’t find this unfathomably demented compared to any other solo acoustic songwriter album you can name.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “If there’s a single Jandek record to own, I would strongly recommend this one...it stands as a rare moment of clarity within his typically willful obliteration of blues and folk standards. Blue Corpse constantly returns to citations of killing time, falling into the river, and pining for lost love. Jandek’s naturally melancholic wisp of a voice mopes through each of these songs, presenting itself as an embodiment of his internal gloom. Of course, these could be allegorical fictions and metaphoric dramas. Musically, there is also a considerable change in the Jandek approach [here] as his solo guitar work is principally acoustic and actually follows recognizably folkish chord progressions.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “Theory has it that Nancy left Jandek for good and this record was the painful result of that, his ‘breakup’ album. Also, apparently the singer on the first three songs isn't Jandek, but his mate Bob from the pub. I still think it's Jandek... ‘Your Other Man’ finds Jandek doing his finest Dylan impersonation... ‘Only Lover’ is ten minutes of echoey-vocals over Jandek on acoustic guitar, improvising whatever's in his head at the time, it's as good as anything by Skip Spence.”

YOU WALK ALONE

(LP, 1988)

(CD reissue, 2002)

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• Jimmy Johnson, Forced Exposure #14, pg. 96. “A celebratory exorcism... His most hard-rockin’, conventional record... The progression of the guitar playing is astounding... It recalls the savage beauty of Mr. Howling Wolf... A masterpiece.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “...surprisingly celebratory in tone... [Jandek] multi-tracks drums (with a more controlled meandering across a drum kit) and additional guitars onto the archetypal Jandek sound of his ghostly voice and avant-blues songs. The points of interest for this album [include] advanced finger picking techniques which haven’t previously found their way onto Jandek’s albums...”
• Daniel Marks, web review (full review). “It’s hard to pick one single album as Jandek’s best considering the constant change in style, but this is my favorite. It’s tuneful enough to be tolerable, but not too much that it isn’t Jandek anymore. This is space-blues-rock at its weirdest... When this album is taken in comparison to some of the Early Period stuff, it’s hard to imagine how they could be the same artist. The songs here sound thought out and possibly rehearsed, but still spontaneous, like the hoot and holler of ‘War Dance’. Jandek makes his most accessible album not by abandoning his basic style but adding into it a more solid interpretation of the blues. He manages to capture not just the music but the spirit of the recordings. It sounds like he’s having a lot of fun, and that fun rubs off on the listener as well... When put in comparison with other blues-rock albums, it’s a piece of trash, but within the context of Jandek’s bizarre catalog, You Walk Alone may very well be the best album you’ve ever heard.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “From the beautiful Velvetsy opening chords of ‘Lavender’, it seems that Jandek has turned yet another creative corner... The oonga-boonga drums are still there, but the electric guitar playing has improved somewhat, and there's another player onboard ‘beefing’ up the sound with reasonably skillful licks and lead runs. In fact some of the garage/lounge room jams on this record are nearly as good as the Reed/Morrison combo in their prime... Jandek's idiosyncratic space-blues working in full effect. In hindsight this ranks as one of the finer indie records of the '80's full-stop.”

ON THE WAY

(LP, 1988)

(CD reissue, 2003)

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• Byron Coley, Forced Exposure #15, pg. 88. “The most varied and easily-accessed Corwoodian brain-scrambler in a while... Of course, if you pay close attention you discover that the central core is as explosively cathartic as any of Jandek’s previous recs.”
• Glen Thrasher, LowLife #15, pg. 18. “Every Jandek record is a letter as personal as it is anonymous. Listening to a new one I get the feeling I should not be listening at all... To study, analyze, and ponder over these private soundtracks is quite immoral.”
• Fred Mills, Sound Choice #17 (1992). “...it’s the timelessness of Jandek’s music; not in the usual sense, but more in the way each recording seems to interlock, ‘progression’ being a deliberate avoidance of industry-biz ‘growth’ (in terms of finesse, or production, or definable writing periods). Jandek, the sonic jigsaw architect: the picture steadily gets bigger, but never in the right direction... Side one is the rock ’n’roll side this time out... ‘Sadie’ is gutwrenching, sleazy blues that could’ve been a demo for Exile on Main Street one time long, long ago. ‘Message to the Clerk’ is Chicago-by-way-of-Delta honk with some terrific harp blowing and what’s maybe Jandek’s most forceful (lucid yet drunkenly manic at the same time) vocals to date — with personally revealing lyrics involving the doctor, the priest, the boss and even the teeth... ‘Give it the Name’ sounds like Big Brother and the Holding Company jamming before Janis arrives. Side two, by contrast, is a total reversal of its raucous counterpart, a quite meditative set for voice, acoustic guitar and marginal percussion. ‘I’ll Sit Alone And Think A Lot About You’ is 9 mins. of impenetrability, as painful for the artist to record as it is for the listener to decipher...”
• uncredited, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 2003. “Features a darkly obscured color photograph of a drum kit barely illuminated at dusk through a window shade. I’m not sure it really translates on CD, but in original LP form it rated as one of the more staggeringly oblique jackets of all time.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2003. “Pretty abrasive... although it also has the distinction of being one of the more technically proficient albums from Jandek. Working clearly with recognizable blues progressions, Jandek offers a range of expressive (albeit sharply mangled) guitar solos on top of a rhythm section that actually keeps relatively normal time. Yet at the same time, Jandek is really aggro, finding himself on the manic side of the bi-polar equation...”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “Album opener finds Jandek experimenting in the studio panning the lyrics hard left and instruments hard right... ‘Message to the Clerk’ gets the Sonny Terry/Brownie McGee treatment here on one of the most ‘conventional’ and passionate performances of his career... Members of Jandek's anonymous musical 'collective' from either the local pub, church group or Rotary Club seem to have returned, as the person I call ‘Jeff’ makes a somewhat drunken and rambling guest vocal on ‘Sadie’. The last three tracks find Jandek in quite an introspective, mellow mood... Jandek is well and truly finding his mojo. Whether accidental or on purpose, that's genius by any motherfucker's standards.”

THE LIVING END

(LP, 1989)

(CD reissue, 2003)

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• Glen Thrasher, LowLife #16, pg. 32. “There is a special solitary beauty to everything that comes from the Corwood Post Office Box that nothing else in the entire ‘recording industry’ can approximate.”
• uncredited, CMJ #211, November 1990. “ ...the mysterious Jandek has remained the most solitary and impenetrable of blues travelers, and on The Living End, he’s got dem old lonesome, downhearted brown-acid blooze again. Most of this album features the prominent vocal stylings of the mysterious uncredited female vocalist (Mrs. Jandek?) whose eerie and disembodied presence has been felt on numerous Jandek projects, but never so thoroughly or deeply as here. She langours and languishes through metaphysical duets with the master (flashing back to a young Grace Slick in a cracked jam at the Airplane House circa `66), as the two partake in a rambling metaphysical discourse reminiscent of John and Yoko’s spoken word/groan Plastic Ono collaborations like Two Virgins or Life With The Lions. There’s plenty of the off-kilter blues cacophony you’d expect from a good Jandek album — thunderous, detuned tom-toms and plunky, cracked-neck guitars — but Jandek seems to be pulling it all with him toward some unknown spiritual destination, a bit like an avant-garde Van Morrison or a deconstructed Marvin Gaye. It’s either totally deep or totally junk, but if he goes to such pains as to include a minuet (‘Pastimes’), a monastic chant (‘Om’) and a whole song constructed from plinking those little bits of the strings down by the guitar’s bridge, he has to have some idea what he’s doing.”
• uncredited, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 2003. “Twelve shorter trackers, dual blues... ‘Nancy’ sings ‘Crazy’, which is the track you’ll put on your next mix tape.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “For a couple of years at the end of the ’80s through the beginning of the ’90s, the mysterious Texan avant-folk artist Jandek produced his most polished and refined recordings. Yet at the same time, these recordings could never be described as anything but Jandekian. The songs are still led by angular mutations of blues chord progressions that constantly meander out of tune and occasionally return to archetypal melodies; however, the production quality is distinctly balanced. The guitars — which alternate between electric and acoustic — sit comfortably within the stereofield, never striving for the nails-on-the-chalkboard abrasion as heard on previous Jandek albums... The drums while typically arrhythmic and clunky also politely stand behind the other instrumentation... comparatively ‘well-adjusted’ and less manic-depressive...”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “ ...an iconic album cover... the man, in genuine ‘anti hero’ mode — giving you either a totally uncertain or a ‘what the fuck do you want, motherfucker?’ type look. The first five songs on the album are basically Jandek and friend learning how to jam the blues, the same way you probably did with a Mel Bay book when you were 15. Track six, ‘Talk That Talk’ finds Jandek's hired-gun guitarist really fanging it, on some bitchin’ electrified blues... album closer ‘Crazy’ finds our dynamic duo [Jandek and Nancy] back to their old fractured and cracked sonic tricks, the type of music you make when its 42 degrees C outside and you've had way too much beer and pot and crank...”

SOMEBODY IN THE SNOW

(LP, 1990)

(CD reissue, 2003)

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• Steve Erickson, Cut #10, pg. 28. “As lush as untuned guitars recorded on a 4-track can get (closer than you think)... Jandek’s muse continues to progress.”
• Glen Thrasher, LowLife #17, pg. ???. “Rounded up into one big heap, all the Jandek records at once amount to an almost impenetrable thing... A demanding, invigorating, tragic, visionary work.”
• Lisa Carver & Bill Callahan, Rollerderby #???. “LISA: This is one cover that makes me wish we had a stereo. Jandek looks really creepy with his Scandinavian colorlessness and big bent back. BILL: I think it’s time for me to slick my hair back and grow sideburns.”
• uncredited, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 2003. “Brightly colored photograph of a well-gelled man is a favorite in many circles. Musically similar to the Living End sessions.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2003. “...doesn’t deviate from the path set by its predecessor... in polishing his avant-folk/blues songs into a small subset of relatively tasteful recordings. Yet, this album is not without its eccentricities and creepy mysteries... While there are a couple of acoustic guitar numbers, Jandek mostly plays electric guitar with a signature laziness, allowing all of the twinkling notes to swim in the spring reverb from his amp.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “...suave and sinister... The ‘Boogie Period’ continues, though on this album he's gone for a more psychedelic, yet earthy vibe... Bleed. It seems that Nancy's back, though Seth Tisue reckons it's a new singer, and since there's no real knowledge of the actual chronology of Jandek's recordings, I reckon it's Nancy recorded at a later period in time. The opening three tracks find Nancy taking sole vocal duties, then there's a quite amateurishly lovely instrumental ‘Pastimes’ before things just go MENTAL... Nervy playing coupled with Jandek's experimenting with stereo vocals makes it a challenging and often jarring experience...”

ONE FOOT IN THE NORTH

(LP, 1991)
(CD reissue, 2003)

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• Byron Coley, Forced Exposure #18, pg. 83. “Jandek’s collected works represent a vast sonic and emotional map that holds an incredible wealth of treasure...”
• Glen Thrasher, LowLife #17, pg. ???. “A quick glimpse at the twenty LP’s by this extraordinary Texas original might lead some people to conclude that he’s some misplaced Borges character, tirelessly rereleasing the same record over and over, stubbornly attempting to perfect his art without changing anything... Yet he constantly redefines his personal vision.”
• uncredited, CMJ #240, June 1991. “ Hey, folks, don’t get so upset about that guy downstairs moaning, groaning and battering his guitar: that’s jus’ ol’ Mr. Jandek, workin’ it on out. Last year found the mysterious shaman fidgeting with his formula of confrontational interstellar blues/folk/rock and poetic psychodrama, presenting a Jandek in transition, with a tenuous link to previous work, and One Foot In The North continues this motion, but even a Jandek in flux is bolder and stronger than most mere mortals. ‘Upon The Grandeur,’ for instance, could be Jandek’s ‘Stairway To Heaven,’ with its placid acoustic intro, yet another interplanetary epic of oblique poetry and lucid guitar exploration... He’s likeable in his own crooning, dissonant and eerie way. Influential, oblique and utterly incomprehensible from first note to last, every passing Jandek album gives us more clues, which still don’t necessarily make the picture any clearer.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2003. “...at the college radio station... in heavy PSA rotation was a particularly haunting one on schizophrenia. Making the 30 second saga of this misunderstood teenager even creepier was the backing music which some smartass at the radio station had grafted onto the announcement. It was ‘Yellow Pages’ by Jandek. With its lazy electric guitar meandering through a series of painfully sad notes and the lyrics ‘You’ve got to help me dear/ Because there’s no release/ From this tangled beast’ which chimed in perfectly to the scripted dialogue, the pathos of abject failure and mental anguish was so perfectly realized, it was comical... quintessential downer listening.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “This album sounds like a bit of a pastiche of out-takes and recordings from his BLUE and PURPLE periods with a bit of BOOGIE thrown in for good measure... ‘Upon the Grandeur’ lives up to its title — eight and a half minutes of beautiful panoramic balladry, oozing atmosphere, another Jandek classic...”

LOST CAUSE

(LP, 1992)
(CD reissue, 2003)

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• C. Koon, Yet Another Fanzine, v3#1, pg. 6. “Back when college radio was FUN, there were two main camps: those who thought that Jandek was a true genius on the level of Monk or Adkins, and those who thought that we were just looking for something so totally obscure, so unlistenable, that we would just out-hip everybody. It’s ’92... Jandek is still here... And his detractors, well, they all work for Sony now, don’t they?”
• Jimmy Johnson, Forced Exposure #18, pg. 83. “Side one has 7 non-datable tracks of depressed blues-destroying ramble... Early optimism on the opening tracks transmutes into full desolation by the closing hack-gulps at the end... “The Electric End” is a nineteen-plus minute excursion into frothful extremes. Piercing electro-search guitar, revolutionary ultra-primitive drumming, lost-mind vocalism of real cracked creation and some sort of high end squeal (a penny whistle?) combine in an incredibly wasted fashion.”
• uncredited, CMJ #295, July 1992. “If all the mighty alternative media forces of the nation had real guts, they’d embrace Jandek into their innermost circle of hipness, and his face along with the graphic images of Corwood Industries would suddenly become as commonplace and recognizable among the 120 Minutes set as pierced noses... Jandek’s released a string of some 20-odd releases over the years... each a tiny, tormented masterpiece of his own singular and unparalled genre. This time, it seems like a few new instruments are added to the equation — we hear what sounds like violins, bats, car horns, bagpipes, or something amidst the familiar churning drums and cracked guitar stylings.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “The last chapter in Jandek's BOOGIE period... ‘Babe I Love You’ is a cute, hooky little number that could even be hit (or a college/indie hit). ‘Crack a Smile’ finds our man playing pretty competent, mellow strummy guitar, and does his best Tim Buckley impersonation... Then things start to change. It seems that Jandek purchased some new recording equipment as well as a new out-of-tune steel string guitar [for the rest of side 1]. Album closer ‘The Electric End’ is Jandek’s version of ‘L.A. Blues’ or ‘Journey Through the Outer Darkness’ or Coltrane's ‘Om’. Nineteen minutes of atonal, psychotic BLARE featuring noise, crash, howl, one of those bird whistles and someone trying to make that weird sound that the 13th Floor Elevators did on ‘You're Gonna Miss Me’. After 4 minutes, I get a piercing migraine.”

TWELFTH APOSTLE

(LP, 1993)
(CD reissue, 2003)

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• Byron Coley, Forced Exposure #18, pg. 83. “His playing, singing, and writing are at a peak here... No one is creating a body of work w/ more offtrack cohesion and beauty than Jandek.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “The beginning of yet another new creative period... Finally, most of the album covers are in colour and feature snapshots of a house, as if Jandek has taken a holiday from his bedroom to the house next door! On first impression [this] record was way more mellow than the stuff on Telegraph Melts but no less atonal... in many ways the ‘Digital Age’ finds Jandek asserting himself as a bona-fide master of the white-boy-lounge-room-Suburban Blues at that point in time. No one sounded like him, had been as prolific as him, nor had created a body of work as unique as him. But the zeitgeist at the time was no doubt squeezing forth artists that had to have heard or admired his chutzpah of the whole Corwood production line, and were taking notice, enter: Beck, Royal Trux, Palace Music, Cat Power, Smog, etc. etc. Twelfth Apostle finds Jandek solo once again implementing a clearer sounding, yet no less fractured playing style reminiscent of his early albums, but using more scratch/plucking than the usual arrhythmic strums. ‘Could Be Anyone’ finds Jandek introducing a slight echo/delay on the guitar sound to complement the reverb on his voice...” ”

GRAVEN IMAGE

(CD, 1994)
(CD reissue, 2003)

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• Josh Ronsen, Monk Mink Pink Punk #3, pp. 33–4. “Jandek’s blues is one of an almost nightmarish intensity of horror and desperation...”
• Josh Ronsen, N D #19. “A continuation of the surreal/nightmare blues thing, with acoustic guitar and Jandek’s sleepy and tortured vocals.”
• Eric Watford, CMJ #407, December 1994. “Since 1978, Jandek has sent out 23 message-in-a-bottle albums to a mostly uncaring world to which he is seemingly oblivious. Although it’s a bit startling to hold a Corwood Industries compact disc, Graven Image is another perfect, uncompromised opus from this unorthodox and dogged songwriter. Another blurry photo of his white house graces the cover of another album of meandering blues-inflected guitar phrases accompanying cryptic and anguished lyrics. What Jandek’s music lacks in conventional skill and grace it makes up for in intimacy and sincerity. His enigmatic blues meditations are a unique and compelling personal mode of communication. There are, as usual, little surprises for Jandek aficionados (an accordion solo on ‘A Real Number’ and a crazy, light-hearted harmonica blues number called ‘Janky’), but overall he remains remarkably consistent and true to his original vision, however obscure that vision might be. On the aptly-titled opening track, ‘Remain The Same,’ he sings ‘I drive, I don’t know where I’m driving. I am, I don’t know what it is to be.. You can just find me floating, sometimes, down rivers of tears...’”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “Jandek's tales of suburban claustrophobia and banal situations continue... He obviously seems older, more introspective and existential if there's an operative word, and his lyrics have that sort of simple yet poetically suggestive tone...”

GLAD TO GET AWAY

(CD, 1994)

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• Tommy Tearaway, Outsight web site (http://www.concentric.net/~Hopeorch/outsight/). Joint review of Glad to Get Away and White Box Requiem. “He sometimes howls with that lonely pain found on Steven Jesse Bernstein’s Trigger demos... I give this six washing machines, rusting away in a back yard.”
• uncredited (Jimmy Johnson?), Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 1995. “The 2nd Jandek CD, an all-acoustic masterpiece. Haunting, eternal genius, continued.”
• Eddie Flowers. Quoted at The History of Rock Music, Vol. 4 (website). “Sixteen years after his first album, Jandek sounds more confident in his playing, and his vocals are more up front, but his detuned/untuned acoustic guitar and depressed, stream-of-consciousness folk/blues songs remain at the core of his music... ‘Rain in Madison’ jumps out, a cracked blues-style story about... something (‘you know you can’t bring no electric devices out in the rain’). On ‘Van Ness Mission,’ he turns up the echo full blast for a disturbing ’delic journey that continues on ‘Anticipation’ like a free-style Tav Falco goin’ down slow. ‘Nancy Knows’ is an awkward but complex instrumental that clearly shows Jandek now moving his left hand around the neck of his guitar in a way very foreign to his early open-strum approach. I wonder if the tune is named for the same Nancy who sang on chair beside a window back in ’82. ‘Take My Will’ is more early blues, Jandek-style... He pulls out his harmonica for a little dylan-squeal accompaniment on ‘Plenty’. The cycles of nature are not often rapid; listen as one of nature’s strangest wonders continues to slowly ‘progress.’”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “...opens with some plunking in what sounds like Jandek attempting to learn some Appalachian banjo picking. It doesn't get far before he delivers one of his most outrageous lines, the horror movie: ‘Hey mister can you tell me, is there a knife stuck in your face?’ delivered in a purely absurdist style that fits perfectly with the general absurdist feel of this record. Out of tune Appalachian banjo-picking and scratch strumming are the order of the day... and will represent the bulk of Jandek's acoustic guitar playing style to this day. Travel seems to be on the agenda here as Jandek tells us about ‘Rain in Madison’ and the ‘Van Ness Mission’ which is drowned in echo, and makes his detuned strumming sound kinda rubbery.”

WHITE BOX REQUIEM

(CD, 1996)

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• Karen Eliot, Bullet Train web site (http://www.galivant.com/~tjustman/bultoc.htm). “Minimal gritty blues... An acquired taste, but a true eccentric worthy of some documentation and attention.”
• Frank van den Elzen, Popwatch #8. “It seemed that after the two 1994 CDs Jandek had buried his guitar for good... Like his last few, this is an all-acoustic affair. He doesn’t play full chords a lot this time around and concentrates on his famed extraterrestrial single-string melodies...”
• Josh Ronsen, Monk Mink Pink Punk #4. “It’s mostly solo acoustic guitar and less than half the songs have vocals... Title themes include: Cognition (“Second Thoughts”, “Thinking”, “Wondering”, “What Should I Do”) and Movement (“Eternal Waltz”, “Walking the Park”, “Moon Dance” and “Approaching the City”)... I just enjoy the creepy, bluesy mystery of it all.”
• uncredited, CMJ #490, September 1996. “One... theory holds that you can hear progress between albums, and that the aesthetic progression between [Ready for the House] and the present volume is like the distance from, say, Samuel Beckett’s early poems to his last prose pieces — a style going from eccentricity to bizarre purity... The guitar playing this time is mostly one or two notes at a time, untuned, all at a single tempo, unconnected by perceptible melody, with reverb that makes it sound like every note is being played exactly twice. The absolute extremity of these deathbed blues (near the beginning, Jandek sings that he has died; at the end, another song explains that he didn’t really die) suggests either an aesthetic pushed near its ultimate point or inhuman exhaustion.”
• Eddie Flowers. Quoted at The History of Rock Music, Vol. 4 (website). “Heavy on instrumentals... Much of the time, Jandek seems to be pondering city life versus a nice trip in the country. ‘Walking in the Meadow’ is an interesting, and delicate, struggle through 7:45 of instrumental blues pickin’. ‘Evening Sun’ and ‘The Glade’ are melancholy memories back home in big-city Houston. ‘Approaching the City’ becomes heart-pounding anxiety... The droney instrumental ‘Eternal Waltz’ seems to be the artist resigned to his own internal world, but on the final track, he lets us know that he ‘Didn’t Really Die’.”
• Gary “Pig” Gold, In Music We Trust #55 (December 2002). “I’m happy to report his relatively recent conversion to the digital domain doesn’t seem to have blunted his impact one single byte: his songs remain as starkly beautiful as a David Lynch opening shot, and the accompaniment (imagine handing your most ornery nine-year-old nephew a $29 guitar before locking him for three days in a windowless basement) remains as brutally poignant as ever.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “Jandek is sporting some mean mutton-chops... The album is drenched in echo on the guitar, but not so it sounds rubbery. The mood is kinda lethargic, and very introspective. In fact, I'd call [this] the closest Jandek's come to a concept album, with doubt and mortality being the major themes and the white box representing what I think is a coffin. Songs have a sub-conscious quality about them, most of them are short and end abruptly, it takes about three or four listens before it really kicks in, and I'd advise listening with a portable device... killer... sublime... Jandek's best album of the 90’s.”

I WOKE UP

(CD, 1997)

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• Josh Ronsen, N D #21. “Perhaps the strangest Jandek on digital format to date... Jandek usually sounds guilty to me, but of what I can’t fathom. Maybe something is hidden under the seat cushions on the couch that adorns the cover. Not for those who faint at exposure to (rubbed) raw spirit.”
• Fred Mills, Magnet #31. “More existential twang, strum, holler, and moan. Of course, a shylock like Will Oldham gets laid a lot when he pulls this trick, so it’s patently unfair that Texas recluse Jandek doesn’t get those same dumpy groupies.”
• Eddie Flowers. Quoted at The History of Rock Music, Vol. 4 (website). “This is a peculiar and special disc from Jandek, upbeat and focused on his harmonica playing! His experiments with higher guitar tunings also continue, which contrasts nicely with his voice which age has lowered... the voice is no longer the fragile young man of the early 1980s. Jandek is still seemingly disconnected from the so-called real-world, but now he at least seems comfortable in front of his tape recorder. ‘Get Back Inside’ is a surprising duet for harmonica and what sounds like pump organ playing a cowboy semi-polka ’round the campfire... ‘Impending Doom’: a bit of drum-kit rattle works as a short intro before Jandek breaks into a chanted vocal while beating insistently on a conga or bongo drum (just one). ‘Today’... ends abruptly with the declaration: ‘God is now alive in the world today.’ Has Jandek been ‘saved’; ‘woke up’?”
• Gary “Pig” Gold, In Music We Trust #55 (December 2002). “Houston’s best-kept musical secret pulls out his trusty harmonica and confronts, tackles, and ultimately leaves for dead the entire damnable singer/songwriter idiom... “Alone On That Mountain,” the second song on this characteristically disturbing disc, begins a seven-song suite of horrific music-making which concludes with the suspectfully healthy advice, “Take It Easy.” Yeah, right... I Woke Up is but another installment in an on-going body of work absolutely without equal in the Uneasy Listening annals.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “If any record represents the ‘postcards from the depths of a suburban wasteland’ period, then [this] is it. It seems that there is a guest vocalist on the album, some ‘bloke’ with a deadpan voice who could be an institutionalized beatnik... There's lots of jagged harmonica and that annoying piano-accordion. Delayed guitars, more bizarre deadpan vocals by ‘the bloke.&rsquo... so fucked up as to be ridiculous, but... not without... charms.”

NEW TOWN

(CD, 1998)

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• uncredited, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 1998. “It features our man in acoustic mode, harshly stroking his guitar in a manner that suggests not penny of investment has been proposed towards technical advancement. The live-room, hiss-relevant recording quality is still omnipresent and if you were feeling good about your contemporary fortune it’s quite possibly that this album holds wordage of universal truth. Once again.”
• Eddie Flowers. Quoted at The History of Rock Music, Vol. 4 (website). “...in his ‘usual’ style, although the lyrics now seem more personal than simply depressed. A couple of exceptions to the vibe this time: the jagged instrumental ‘Street Walk’, and what sounds like Jandek pounding on the back of his guitar while singing and playing harmonica on ‘Time Will Come’.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “Interesting to note the amount of ambient hiss on this record compared to most of his ’90’s output. While there really isn't anything new going on here, there are some nice moments...”

THE BEGINNING

(CD, 1999)

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• Eddie Flowers. Quoted at The History of Rock Music, Vol. 4 (website). “Yet another start for Jandek... ‘Hello,’ he sings, ‘it’s February.’ For the title tune, Jandek spends fifteen and a half minutes alone on piano! No vocals either. His hammering chords at the high end of the keyboard sometimes sound close to his hard-strum guitar, but the more melodic moments, especially the lower notes, are new sounds for this artist. By virtue of the instrument, Jandek sounds more ‘in tune’ than usual, but listen for those passages where he combines chords to somehow create bell-like sounds, or the high-end ‘crazy’ freak-out stuff that he uses very sparingly. The overall mood of the piece is somber, ‘classical’ in a broad stylistic sense, with free-style flourishes that are maybe unconscious. Pretty great.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “...a fine return to the 'pure' Jandek sounds of Six and Six, the production is murky, vocals thick with reverb and the guitars plunk and strut along in a bluesy swagger... the biggest farewell to the 21st century comes with his reality-twisting-Black Hole that is the title track. A fifteen minute dirge on a new instrument — the piano — that sounds like the first thrill you got when you played a piano as a kid and you thought you could play flashy all over the keyboard like Johnny Johnson or Jerry Lee Lewis or Liberace. Jandek actually plays the piano with the same manic gusto that he plays guitar, occasionally bashing it, occasionally finding moments of beauty. It reminds me a bit of Sun Ra's playing on ‘Gods on Safari’... ”

PUT MY DREAM ON THIS PLANET

(CD, 2000)

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• uncredited, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 2001. “It’s certainly a head-scratcher. No guitar, no drums, no piano, just him rambling on for a small eternity in a sort of song/speech mode... all of it sounding kind of like it was recorded though a 15 watt Peavey Bandit amp with a broken reverb spring and a noise-gate pedal. Eerie (some might say annoying or god awful), almost bluesy hiss bathed vocals are separated by some rather lengthy periods of complete silence, covering some of the places and ‘feelings’ that populate his other records so vividly. Reading into it a bit (for in this place everything means something), we see that his last record ended with ‘The Beginning’ (!) — a 15+ vocal-less (!) piano ‘meditation’ which certainly clouded the waters when it dropped — which can now be viewed as an intro to this new acapella recording...you get the idea. So then, as concrete poetry it’s not so hot, and as some kind of Out Blues piece, it’s actually rather dire, but viewed in the microscope of the Jandekian Canon, it’s pretty massive, and that’s saying something too.”
• Eddie Flowers. Quoted at The History of Rock Music, Vol. 4 (website). “A startling album of stark-naked music from the man who has been trying to bare all since he started recording in the late 1970s. Using only his voice, Jandek literally begs for understanding for nearly 29 minutes on “I Need Your Life”. He’s never sounded so Texan, or so completely immersed in the kind of ultra-personal blues music that existed before the 1930s. In this acapella setting, his emotions run free, and he speaks from painfully deep places... Jandek puts on his shoes for the last song, “I Went Outside,” but once out there, he finds only snow and ice. His venture into the outside world ends abruptly after only a minute-seventeen. If you’ve ever followed Jandek’s uncomfortable journey into his own head, this is essential listening.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “Very disturbing, and not in a good way.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “Jandek is going through his abstract expressionist stage. Sure it's acapella, though it seems that Jandek has edited chunks of vocals in a Burroughsian lyrical cut-up style. It's hard listening, considering there's only 3 tracks and two of them go for over 20 minutes. But the most interesting thing to note is the fact that the voice has changed. Obviously there was a long break in recording — maybe for the whole '90's? — but here Jandek sounds like a guy who's at least in his late '40's, compared to the 20-30 something that appeared on nearly all his previous recordings.”

THIS NARROW ROAD

(CD, 2001)

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• uncredited, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 2001. “I have no idea what to say.”
• George Parsons, Dream Magazine #3. “Opening with ‘One Last Chance’ which is just a few seconds shy of half an hour, and features the voice of Jandek giving chilling sing-songy readings to his thoughts, with no musical accompaniment. He pleads to god, the void or just himself, for the titular subject matter. The sound of someone at the end of their rope; and not that much different from anyone else in such a situation; but such hopeless circles of thought are seldom uttered out loud, let alone, recorded. Looking at himself in detached judgment and not liking what he sees. The cumulative effect is grueling and mesmerizing. The remaining eleven tracks are much shorter and range from poems to songs and something very like prayers... ‘I Need To Be’ is actually quite poppy, and has a memorable melody line, though it’s broken up by the stop/start nature of his recording method. The single strongest track may well be ‘Just Like the Floor’, which is like a concise poetic sensory psychodrama.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “These two a capella albums debunk the myth that Jandek recorded all of his albums during an excessively manic period of his life, as the voice which utters and lolligags through the stream of consciousness verbage has clearly aged from the wispy juvenile voice found on Ready For The House to hold a more grizzled delivery that is eerily similar to Charles Manson.”
• Nick Phillips. “Mystery White Boy”, City Pages, Vol. 22, #1087 (10/3/2001). “So are these new albums any good? Well, good and bad are strange terms to be using in relation to Jandek records. But listening to them, I can’t help being a little disappointed. Lyrically they seem weak — sadly obsessive, with none of the traumatic imagery that made his earlier work so arresting. This Narrow Road’s 29-minute opener is perhaps the nadir: a stream-of-consciousness rant that sucks all the complexity out of the Jandek myth. The song chooses instead to play the scary-weirdo card: ‘Let them die, they all deserve, let them die/ It ain’t like killing/ It’s annihilation, extermination, elimination/ Eliminate the bad.’ Yet part of me wonders whether my complaints have anything to do with these new albums — if, in fact, my incompatibility with Jandek is not his fault but my own. I’ve escaped the mess of suburban sprawl and retreated to the happy calm of the countryside. My head no longer cluttered, I don’t find Jandek’s current pathology illuminating: unmasked, it suddenly sounds single-minded and, well, pathetic. Maybe, with my newfound contentment, I’m no longer able to access the depths of feeling concealed within Jandek’s music. That, even more than his music, would be truly terrifying.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “...continues the cut-up vocal trend, the pieces are shorter, and come off more like vocal ballads...”

Other commentary

• Thomas Nondorf, in E-mail. “[Nick Phillips’] review... is almost intentionally misleading. It says Jandek plays the ‘scary weirdo card’ and quotes lines from ‘One Last Chance’ out of context. A simple look at the lyrics shows J is talking about killing the bad things in his life that are bringing him down, not going on a killing spree or something.” [Note: I agree. — ST]

WORTHLESS RECLUSE

(CD, 2001)

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• George Parsons, Dream Magazine #3. “Once upon a time we had a few phone conversations that were as honest and uncompromised as any of his recordings; it’s a shame that he shuns the public eye... but it’s also good to say nothing as well... So he ends up being the work, which is maybe all any artist really should be after all... These pieces are part spoken word, part musicless song, but the musical pauses are there... It becomes a dialogue of this guy with himself, even if the songs may be directed outward like letters to loved and hated friends, they are all multifaceted grey mirrors of this solitary soul. There is no shame or cornabll acting antics in his readings, he sounds true and transcendentally human, fractured and flawed. I wish I could say I didn’t relate to this as much as I do...”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “Unfortunately fulfills the self-effacing title, as the Texan hermit offers his third album of a capella ‘songs’ and poetic readings. As difficult as they may have been to listen to, his arrangements for questionably competent guitar picking and stumbling drums are sorely missed. While these a capella albums are at the bottom of the Jandek catalogue, he has been mucking about with his 4 track giving a few interesting ‘effects’ upon his voice. But that’s all...”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “...does away with any tunefulness and goes for straight ahead spoken word inter-galactic beat poetry... Why this hasn't been taken more seriously by the spoken-words/poetry scene as a major work is a travesty of the highest order.”

I THREW YOU AWAY

(CD, 2002)

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• uncredited, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 2001. “A return to form album... on this album, the Blues turn Black.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002. “Jandek preceded I Threw You Away with three a capella / spoken word albums that were ultimately forgettable detours from his signature sound of damaged folk music. Here, the Texan mystery man has returned to the open chord guitar strum and meandering finger picking techniques while he unleashes that desolate moan of a voice revealing staggering visions of any number of inescapable existential truths. Musically, I Threw You Away is a very obtuse (even for Jandek!) maze of untuned acoustic dissonance and emotional caterwauling.”
• Byron Coley, Signal To Noise, Winter 2003. “...a cracked masterpiece of cat-scratch-acoustic-guitar and blue-tongued howling. The opening cut, a 12 minute-plus dirge entitled ‘Blues Turned Black’ (akin to a one man recreation of Patty Waters’ live version of ‘Black is the Color’) sets the mood. As the guitar scrabbles around the edges of its self-defined cell-of-meat, the vocals release gusts of heart-borne anguish that are wildly articulate without approaching vocal/lyrical specificity. If you give yourself over to it, this piece will haul you down into the depths of the well of despond more artfully, more fully, then ’most anything else imaginable. It’s like mainlining grief. The three shorter pieces traverse parallel tracks. They visit the butcher shop of the soul, walk through a graveyard of living flowers, and stare at the remains of an abandoned basement, while the acoustic strings bleed detuned open chord note-drops, and a harmonica rises out of an animal’s forgotten corpse. The other long track, ‘Frozen Beauty’, is a meditation on the semiotic distance between reality-itself and the image of reality, power-moaned through a cascade of circular guitar figures. It is the piece here that is perhaps most reminiscent of Jandek’s early recordings, as sad as a pillowcase full of photographs of dead lovers. But for all of its dolor, it seems to me that I Threw You Away (a repeating lyric motif that first occurs in ‘It Seems Forever’) represents a new beginning for Jandek, following the utter hermetic desolation of the three last albums. For we who love this guy’s material and its coding and the sense it gives of creating its own portable cloister, such a reinstatement of relative pop construction is welcome. Jandek’s music is so enigmatic that it often seems to be as much the creation of the listener as the player. So when he himself appears to be trapped beyond the boundaries of despair-as-we-know-it, serious listeners can also find themselves transported beyond the reach of salvation. And that’s not always good, but it is perhaps a key to understanding the splendid interior corridors that Jandek alone seems capable of accessing...”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “The death rattle guitar from Ready for the House kicks-off proceedings for about 40 seconds, before Jandek... starts to HOOOOWWWWLLL and MOOOOAAANNNN lyrics about loss, death and any other negativity. Tracks are long with none under 7 minutes that frequently blur into long dirges. The album title speaks for itself, and you might just do the same to it.”

THE HUMILITY OF PAIN

(CD, 2002)

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• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “This album continues from I Threw You Away. Not much new going on here, though Jandek is starting to sound like a really drunk hobo.”

THE PLACE

(CD, 2003)

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• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “I don't mind this record, it's another concept album. Jandek introduces a bit of harmonica and experiments with his vocals which at times sound ‘sultry’... Then, he tries to sound like some sort of Irishman. Highlights are ‘The Highway’ with its chilling psycho-noir ambience, and ‘The Answer’ which has a middle 8.6675432321 that sounds like early, damaged Sonic Youth.”

THE GONE WAIT

(CD, 2003)

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• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “Another musical chapter begin, as Jandek puts down the guitar and picks up a bass. It's always interesting to note that each new instrument Jandek picks up sounds like not only is he playing it for the first time, but more importantly, discovering the SONIC POSSIBILITIES of the instrument in a totally fresh light. The bass playing here is totally detuned, and sounds like it's probably a fretless electric. It might sound like Mingus, and it might sound like Fernando Saunders if he wasn't so... happy. Jandek plunks the bass much like he does the guitar, often playing double notes, but not in the way Peter Hook does it. He moans, though in a more sedate manner, giving the record a very downbeat, narcotic jazz feel.”

SHADOW OF LEAVES

(CD, 2004)

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• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “...opening number... is a 29 minute opus of sloth like proportions as his bass waddles along aimlessly with the vocals. Closer ‘I Give You Me’ has Jandek momentarily trying to pop the strings like Doug Wimbish, before he delivers those sort of ‘you're a loser and I'm going to fuck with your head’ type lyrics that Lydia Lunch and Henry Rollins made careers out of.”

THE END OF IT ALL

(CD, 2004)

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• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “I'm not sure if these next few albums were made before he performed live, if so, then they are perfect primers for the power and intensity his subsequent live shows would display. Jandek straps on the guitar again — this time an electric with a flange effect — making him sound like James Blood Ulmer, or maybe the guy from the Police. Another 20-minute opus, ‘One of Those Moments’ goes into serious Sonic Youth territory and is his best musical moment for nearly 4 years. His singing has more conviction, with the lyrics sounding like the memoirs of a corporate-nobody (ghost?) trying to connect with other 'humans' on some sort of intimate level. The album as a whole 'rocks' more.”

THE DOOR BEHIND

(CD, 2004)

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• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “Electric flange-guitar is still the sonic cause of events, songs are shorter and more sedate than The End of It All, making it a bit of a more difficult listen.”

A KINGDOM HE LIKES

(CD, 2004)

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• Kevin John, The Village Voice (http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0510,john,61827,22.html), March 8, 2005. “Both Jandek and Milli Vanilli taught semiotics as expertly as Umberto Eco... and both were quintessential products of the 1980s. What better way to respond to supply-side Reaganomics than with a music that places all the action on the consumer demand side of the equation... But as the man starts coming out of the closet more and more, his music must now distinguish him from any other sad-sack singer-songwriter out there. And the stream-of-consciousness DIY folk-blues in this kingdom cannot retain interest much longer.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “...finds Jandek reflecting on his ‘fame’ and thinking long and hard about the ‘modern world&rsquo, even technology...”

WHEN I TOOK THAT TRAIN

(CD, 2005)

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• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “...the album's a throwaway.”

GLASGOW SUNDAY

(CD, 2005)
(DVD, 2006)

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• Scott Mou, Other Music web site (http://www.othermusic.com/), 2005. “Blood curdling live set... Jandek displays surprising force and confidence, seemingly hammering away at the guitar with a closed fist while accompanied by Richard Youngs on bass and local kindred spirit, Alex Neilson, masterfully stuttering alongside Jandek on the drums. Unlike the bootleg floating around the Internet, the drums and vocals mesh together well in the forefront, while the bass drone/throb and rattled cage guitar fall back... Enthusiastic applause also included. ”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2005. “No matter what your opinion is of Jandek’s decision to make a public appearance, this recording is fantastic. Youngs and Neilson keep their input strictly as a rhythm section, never to upstage Jandek himself. Throughout the entire set, Youngs keeps his bass within a controlled variation of an elliptical throb and Neilson does the quiet tumble down the stairs thing on the drum kit. But it’s Jandek who really shines. His strangulated blues chords have the same jangling atonality of his earliest records... and his deepened baritone voice snakes through his signature revelatory darkness... If Jandek’s going to come out of his shell to make records this good, who are we to complain!?”
• David Keenan, Volcanic Tongue catalog (link), 2005. “...the first public appearance of his 26 year recording career, simultaneously quashing three decades worth of speculation while inspiring a whole bunch more. But the main thing that makes Glasgow Sunday such an important document has less to do with how it relates to Smith’s personal mythos and more to do with how it inaugurates a group that already looks to be one of the most formally inventive units of the modern age. Between them, the trio... have birthed a free music with an internal dynamic and shared musical language as singular and historically unparalleled as late-20th century behemoths like Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity trio, Keiji Haino’s Fushitsusha, Harry Pussy, and Musica Transonic. Crucially, Glasgow Sunday is a group record... The first time they ever played together was actually earlier on the same day of the concert... [but] the terms of their musical relationship were sealed the instant they began to play. Smith’s current guitar form is most immediately related to the series of recordings he made between 1982 and 1987... [that] were characterised by bouts of ferocious atonal guitar. But here he digs deeper and harder into the magic confluence of overtones encouraged by the more esoteric open tunings. His chords sound like they’re augmented with barbed wire and his soloing &mdashl of which there’s plenty — is somewhere between Keiji Haino’s dense, clean guitar work on Fushitsusha’s John Zorn-produced album Allegorical Misunderstanding, and Harry Pussy guitarist Bill Orcutt circa ‘Nazi USA’. Youngs plays electric bass with a tremolo pulse that sounds a bit like Holger Czukay and the way he pilots odd, beautiful notes straight to the heart of the individual tracks is particularly fearless. Drummer Alex Neilson is the real wildcard. In recent years he has become the most in-demand improvising drummer in Scotland and his playing here is particularly key in terms of defining the basic heft of the sound. Beyond even the bizarre physical resemblance — several people on the night asked if it was Jandek’s son that was playing the drums — there’s obviously a deep level of rapport between the two and during the instrumental breaks Smith seems to be soloing more in relation to Neilson’s tonal and rhythmic suggestions than Youngs’ harmonic ones... Neilson takes it upon himself to push the music somewhere else, alternating explosive polyrhythms with moments of pure textural abandon and accelerated breaks. At one point he even stands up and starts to sing. As with every Jandek project, Glasgow Sunday feels like an extended investigation into a single colour or state... emotionally, lyrically and sonically. Each track draws its deepest architecture from archetypal blues forms, with vocal lulls alternating with extended chord solos and emphatic rhythms. Like the late Albert Ayler, Jandek has a way of hijacking the basest/purest of folk-forms and extrapolating them into the heavens — or in this case, personal hells. Lyrically there are several references to water, seas and drowning, lots of reds and blues, and some of the tracks are unrelentingly bleak, reading like long, airless litanies of hurt. But there’s also plenty of black humour and at points you can’t help but feel that Jandek is poking fun at his own image and playing to the crowd. The moment when he erupts with the line ‘I made the decision to get real wild’ sees the whole audience explode into cheers... Who would’ve thought it? Jandek, it turns out, is a group.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “...like all great artists they eventually gotta do the live album... An amorphous surging, coagulating blob of a live performance, Jandek's electrified death-rattle guitar is immediately reminiscent of Rowland S. Howard's playing on... live Birthday Party. But fortunate for Jandek is the fact that he has a totally cooking backing-band help elevate his sound above junkie skronk (which it still is, mind you) into some sort of free-jazz-rock-implosion with lyrics... ‘Real Wild’... builds and builds and builds in Jandek's water-treading death-knell-guitar style, before he pauses to tell us: ‘I made a decision... to get REAL WILD!’ before collapsing in on itself like a Black Hole. Who said he can't rock out like the best of them? Glasgow Sunday is a great, great live, real time document of the improvised miasma of Jandek, distilled and purified for his legions of fans to enjoy.”

RAINING DOWN DIAMONDS

(CD, 2005)

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• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “...maybe Jandek is making some obscure statement about Islamic fundamentalism or something? He's back to playing his muted-free-form bass again, though here his voice sounds neurotic, fearful, and terrified. He's actually trying to play the bass more, rather than just slap and scratch it, so the overall sonics of the album are far warmer than previous bass-only records. It's easily his best 'bass' album, and his jazziest to boot... Extended closing tracks ‘New Rendezvous’ and ‘Your Visitor’ throb and undulate into infinity, ending perfectly with a whimper.”

KHARTOUM

(CD, 2005)

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Comments

    The title (in combination with the cover photo) create an expectation that the lyrics will reference current events. And sure enough, some lines in the first song seem to be about the World Trade Center: “I wanted to go to the spirit world/ But you were large, large, large, large/ Now you’re all powder/ Gone up in smoke/ Gone down in thunder/ You’re part of my dream...” It seems unmistakable, but there’s nothing else in that song or any song that references the same theme; it seems to be a metaphor he uses once and then discards. But then why “Khartoum”? Even the song of that name seems to be just another song about a woman who’s gone now. One song begins, “You’re married, I presume?” In another, Jandek confesses “I don’t know what to do except sit in a chair.”

Review excerpts

• uncredited, Forced Exposure web site (http://www.forcedexposure.com/), 2005. “Fantastic, acoustic, classic Jandekian masterwork in the vein of his mid-period work Graven Image or Glad to Get Away.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2005. “...his music remains as raw and mysterious as ever... Khartoum consists of alienated, atonal strum-und-twang, teamed with loosely demented vocals, sometimes quietly spoken, sometimes pitched to a warbling holler, delivered with the stream of conciousness lyrical logic of a homeless poet. These songs... seem fixated on past (broken) relationships, forgiveness, regret, and despair... It’s a soul laid bare, speaking directly but in such an idiosyncratic manner that it will only be heard by those with a will to listen. Seriously, his scrabble of strings and chaotic chording provides almost a respite from his depressed words and sometimes excruciatingly miserable wail, one that at times reminds us of Oxbow’s Eugene Robinson.”

KHARTOUM VARIATIONS

(CD, 2006)

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NEWCASTLE SUNDAY

(2CD, 2006)
(DVD, 2006)

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Review excerpts

• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever (actually a review of an audience recording of the concert, before the official release came out). “...as good, if not better than the Instal/Glasgow Sunday one... flange-guitar strum, noodle jazz bass and free-flowing drums, sounding not unlike the Jimi Hendrix Experience on qualuudes. But there's definitely a ‘funk’ going on in this set, before Jandek opens his mouth and says ‘I thought I'd give you... a little bit of DEPRESSION!!!!’ That's right, the man has made a fucken anthem for the Prozac-nation... The set continues a downward looping spiral lyrics-wise as Jandek sings about the electric chair, trying to find friends, and being a loser-in-life in general. But the synergy between the players here is even better than Glasgow Sunday producing some of the most intense, challenging and incredibly FRESH avant-garde music going today... the deep dark hole that he's been digging seems to finally be bringing up the blackest of gold.”

WHAT ELSE DOES THE TIME MEAN

(CD, 2006)

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GLASGOW MONDAY

(2CD, 2006)
(DVD, 2007)

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AUSTIN SUNDAY

(2CD, 2006)
(DVD, 2007)

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Another live double disc. The credit on the back says “RECORDED LIVE: SCOTTISH RITE THEATRE AUSTIN TEXAS AUGUST 28, 2005.” See the Concerts page for details on the performance. The representative from Corwood plays electric guitar and sings; he is accompanied by Juan Garcia (electric bass), Nick Hennies (drums), and Chris Cogburn (drums).

See also http://mylist.net/archives/jandek/2006-November/003339.html.

Data (DVD)

THE RUINS OF ADVENTURE

(CD, 2006)

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Vocals and fretless electric bass.

Comments

See http://mylist.net/archives/jandek/2006-December/003498.html and http://mylist.net/archives/jandek/2006-December/003500.html for commentary by Danen Jobe.

MANHATTAN TUESDAY

(2CD, 2007)

(2DVD, 2008)

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Another live double disc. According to the spine, the name of the album is Manhattan Tuesday. But the name of the composition it contains is “Afternoon of Insensitivity”; this is printed above the track listing. The credit on the back says “RECORDED LIVE: ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES MANHATTAN NEW YORK SEPTEMBER 6, 2005.” The representative from Corwood plays Korg synthesizers (set to organ-like sounds) and sings; he is accompanied by Loren Connors (electric guitar), Matt Heyner (bass), and Chris Corsano (drums).

See the Concerts page for details on the performance.

Data (DVD)

Comments

See http://mylist.net/archives/jandek/2007-May/003911.html for commentary by Danen Jobe.

BROOKLYN WEDNESDAY

(4CD, 2007)

(2DVD, 2008)

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Jandek’s first box set, a 4 CD set, two jewel cases in a cardboard slipcover. The representative from Corwood plays electric guitar (first set) and fretless electric guitar (second set), accompanied by Matt Heyner (bass) and Chris Corsano (drums).

See the Concerts page for details on the performance.

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THE MYTH OF BLUE ICICLES

(CD, 2008)

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Voice and acoustic guitar.

The back says copyright 2007, but the disc wasn’t available from Corwood until February 2008.

“Too Course” is a misspelling; it should be “Too Coarse”.

GLASGOW FRIDAY

(CD, 2008)

(DVD, 2008)

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The credit on the back says “RECORDED LIVE: THE ARCHES  GLASGOW SCOTLAND  OCTOBER 14, 2005.” The representative from Corwood plays electric guitar, accompanied by Richard Youngs (bass) and Alex Neilson (drums). See the Concerts page for details on the performance.

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GLASGOW SUNDAY 2005

(CD, 2008)

(DVD, 2009)

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The credit on the back says “RECORDED LIVE: THE ARCHES  GLASGOW SCOTLAND  OCTOBER 16, 2005”. On the first track the representative from Corwood delivers a long spoken narrative. He also sings and plays harmonica. He is backed by Loren Connors on electric guitar. On the second track, the rep plays drum kit, with Heather Leigh Murray on lap steel guitar and wordless vocals and Alan Licht on electric guitar. See the Concerts page for details on the performance.

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LONDON TUESDAY

(CD, 2008)

(DVD, 2009)

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The credit on the back says “RECORDED LIVE: ST. GILES IN THE FIELDS  LONDON ENGLAND  OCTOBER 18, 2005”. The representative from Corwood sings and plays acoustic guitar. See the Concerts page for details on the performance.

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SKIRTING THE EDGE

(CD, 2008)

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Vocals and acoustic guitar.

HASSELT SATURDAY

(CD, 2009)

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The credit on the back says “RECORDED LIVE: KUNSTCENTRUM BELGIE  HASSELT BELGIUM  NOVEMBER 12, 2005”. The representative from Corwood plays piano and sings. See the Concerts page for details on the performance.

HELSINKI SATURDAY

(CD, 2009)

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The credit on the back says “RECORDED LIVE: GLORIA KULTTUURIAREENA  HELSINKI FINLAND  NOVEMBER 19, 2005”. The representative from Corwood plays piano, accompanied by Iro Haarla on harp. There are no vocals. See the Concerts page for details on the performance.

A 4:18 excerpt from the performance was released in 2005 on the Avanto-Festivaali 2005 CD-R (Avanto AAAAA-2005). Jandek’s track leads off the compilation. There are nine different covers, two of which are shown here; see the Avanto site’s page about the compilation to see small versions of the rest. (The same page also has the full track listing; the other artists include Alva Noto, Blixa Bargeld, and Sudden Infant.) You can order the CD-R for 11 euros from Avanto’s catalog page.

NOT HUNTING FOR MEANING

(CD, 2009)

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Vocals and acoustic guitar.

PORTLAND THURSDAY

(2CD, 2009)

PORTLAND THURSDAY

(2CD, 2009)

(DVD, 2009)

CAMBER SANDS SUNDAY

(CD, 2009)

BRISTOL WEDNESDAY

(2CD, 2010)

CANTICLE OF CASTAWAY

(CD, 2010)

TORONTO SUNDAY

(2CD, 2010)

CHICAGO WEDNESDAY

(2CD, 2010)

(DVD, 2010)

WHERE DO YOU GO FROM HERE

(CD, 2011)

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