Album Review: Earth Sound System by Jackie-O Motherfucker

"In the Willows" starts a Jackie-O Motherfucker album on one of its calmest notes yet -- it's not that there hasn't been that element in their work, but it does seem to be part of a new progression, something gently formal and old country/blues/folk/atmospheric, a repurposing of elements into the alt-country world with a bit of guitar queasiness here and there, building up a bit in terms of volume and drama as it goes but never losing the general stateliness and formality. The contrasting electronic beat stutter cut-up, random sax, and other elements in the immediately following "Raga Joining" show that the more unexpected side hasn't gone away, but might be more parceled out now, with "Raga Separating" later bringing in similarly off-kilter drumming and general instability. This shifting back and forth between tradition and avant-garde tradition, as it were, defines much of the rest of the album -- call it maturing or call it other interests, but it's a comfortable enough listen, as appropriate for the schizophrenic beast that still gets labeled indie rock as anything else.

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I want to live Jackie-O Motherfucker. I want to quit my pretty good downtown job and follow the band around Europe. I want to trade poorly recorded tapes with other superfans and scoff mightily at the non-believers. This is the type of devotion JOMF should inspire. To date, the long-running ….

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Somewhere in the strange gulch between serenity and bizarreness lies Jackie-O Motherfucker (or JOMF, if you prefer), a collective from Portland with the most badass name in all of New Weird America. And more than any other band going, Jackie-O Motherfucker establishes “New Weird America” as a legitimate genre, playing a thoroughly modern mix of homegrown folk music and the sort of dizzy sound effects people probably hear while dropping acid in the wilderness. I’ll put it this way: If Yume Bitsu doesn’t provide the edge you want but you don’t have the stomach for a band like Excepter, Jackie is your girl.

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Jackie-O Motherfucker, the Portland, OR experimental post-rock music group, has accomplished yet another installment of subterranean space-rock recordings with its latest release, Earth Sound System. Tom Greenwood and the collective artists and musicians drawn from the U.S. experimental scene create work inspired by a number of sub-genres and various psychedelic outlets on this album, shying away from the sound of earlier releases since the mid-’90s.

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