If you’re not already familiar with Jandek, he’s one of the most original voices in American music over the last 25 years or so. Though he’s gone through several stylistic shifts, his music is always distinctly identifiable. It’s what blues would sound like if all of the rhythm, melody, and texture were removed, and only the naked, aching emotion were left.

It isn’t music for everyone — my wife hates Jandek passionately, and insists that I can only play his records when I’m by myself, and that’s by no means an unusual opinion. Indeed, for most of his career, Jandek himself seemed not to care whether or not it was music for anyone. Each one of his albums was released on his own “label,” Corwood Industries, which has no other artists, no public office, no website, and releases its “catalog” on a single typewritten sheet of paper. The man himself didn’t speak to the press (with a couple of rare exceptions), never used his real name, and never appeared in public for the first two decades of his career.

Now, he’s taken to playing a handful of live dates, though that’s actually changed little about his modus operandi — he still doesn’t give interviews, he doesn’t talk to or even acknowledge the audience, and though there are a handful of other musicians that he has appeared with, he doesn’t have anything resembling a “touring band.” He has never played any of the songs on any of his albums live, choosing instead to write an entirely new set of songs for each concert, playing them once and then never touching them again.

Perhaps for this reason, Corwood Industries is releasing each of the live shows in turn as a Jandek album. Glasgow Monday is the third such release, following last year’s Glasgow Sunday, and this spring’s Newcastle Sunday. It documents his third show, a performance he gave at Glasgow’s Center for Contemporary Arts on May 23, 2005.

It’s a double album, and uniquely in Jandek’s extensive catalog, it documents a song cycle of sorts: the title of the composition is listed as “The Cell,” and the tracks are labeled “Prelude,” “Part One, “Part Two,” and so on. Although you’d never know it from the nonexistent credits, he’s backed by a rhythm section of Richard Youngs on upright bass and Alexander Neilson on percussion. In a strange sort of post-show editing, all audience noise has been erased, except for a gratuitously long minute of outro applause.

Jandek himself plays the piano and sings on this release. The piano is played in a wandering manner that, if it’s not exactly traditional, is nowhere near as dissonant as either his guitar playing or his keyboard work on his other releases. It sounds like he’s sticking mostly to the white keys. He moans and wails a lot less than on his previous albums too. He almost whispers most of it, sort of like he’s talking to himself.

Generally, it’s an unearthly sort of pretty, an alien conception of beauty that’s much less confrontational than one might expect from him. The rhythm players are very much in the background, with long bowed bass notes, and various high-pitched squeals and chimes that sound for all the world like horror-movie sound effects.

As with much of Jandek’s work, once he finds a sound, he sticks with it. You’d be hard-pressed to name any of the individual tracks just by hearing the piano line, especially as almost all of them start with a variation of the same little clipped chord change. Lyrically, much of it is as dark as any of his previous albums, and though it’s somewhat oblique, it seems to deal with a person fighting a serious illness of some kind. However, it’s got an uncharacteristic note of hope at the end of the closer, “Part Nine.” “I’ll take these things / It’s hope” he says, and a few moments later, he adds, “Whatever it takes / it’s not concluded.”

Glasgow Monday doesn’t sound much like pop — it’s a strange blend of Charles Ives and Blind Willie McTell that bears little resemblance to anything else on the current music scene. But it’s honest, it’s emotional, and in its own way, transcendent. Your significant other might well hate it too, but if you need something to sit and think to after s/he’s gone to bed, Jandek might well be the perfect musician.

Rating: 9/10

4 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment