#corwood

Yesterday I posted a Jandek playlist; here are my favorite albums. Only strict favorites allowed--only those I would recommend to a skeptic--or else it would never stop. I’ve heard nothing after 1994′s Glad to Get Away, which Seth Tisue says is the last good one. Someone should report back to me on The Song of Morgan and its nine nocturnes.

The relative accessibility of Blue Corpse and You Walk Alone makes them no less weird and no less Jandek--it just makes them crisper realizations of Jandek’s peculiar sensibility. If other people are indeed responsible for much of the music on those albums, this too is appropriate, since one reason Jandek fascinates is for leaving intention and provenance a mystery: for the unsettling realization that the authorial hand is absent, and the delight when a new, dynamic interpretive space emerges.

1. Blue Corpse (1987)

Chilly and tremulous, a return to acoustic misery after a number of electric revels, Blue Corpse is a cleansing gesture as shattered and total as David Bowie’s Low. For years Jandek could cough into a microphone and sound like the weirdest musician alive; here he’s writing fractured love songs, which is even weirder. A departed object of desire haunts him. On side two, he performs a spectacular emotional exorcism, with “Harmonica” (compare Bowie’s “Warszawa”) and the expiatory “Only Lover” in which he furiously licks himself clean, trying to scrub the blush from his cheek and the lipstick stains from his guitar. 

2. Telegraph Melts (1986)

I’m not comfortable living on the same planet as the man who recorded “Mother’s Day Card”.

3. Modern Dances (1987)

The sequel to Telegraph Melts, in which an electric noize band romps through a rotting basement, attacking furniture. You can smell the mold, hear the dripping pipes, see the unconscious bassist in the back corner, face down in a pool of blood, slowly dying. Jandek barks sadistic commands through a megaphone (“Twelve Seconds Since February 32nd”), while sparring partner Nancy responds in a flat, talky drawl that combines rock wail and church intonation (“Hand for Harry Idle”). The screeching dissonances and random tempo changes move with gangly discombobulation; as my friend Kevin Bozelka put it, this is music for and perhaps by people who are uncomfortable with their bodies. But the resulting clonk is so clumsy it’s funny, capturing an absurd and delightful spirit of play. 

4. You Walk Alone (1988)

Quite randomly, he developed a gift for melody. Jandek and a second guitarist who may or may not also be Jandek embark on long guitar benders in a weirdly tuned major-key mode, so that the emotion repressed on Blue Corpse just pours from this one, like a good cry after bottling everything up for a while. The electric crackle hisses and bleeds melancholy. Nearly every song reprises lyrics from earlier songs with so much more sadness and frustration and terrible beauty, although the effect is disorienting too, since the fragmented, sample-like nature of the repetition undercuts the illusion of expressionism. Did he always feel this way? Does he even really now?

5. Later On (1981)

With his third album, he realized legible absurdity is even scarier than incoherence. His guitar is not out of tune; it’s just tuned to an atonal chord. Is “Your Condition” addressed to someone dead of a heart attack, or someone in love?

6. Chair Beside a Window (1982)

A collection of acoustic blues sketches with zero blues chords--just the thing! Jandek’s atonality reminds me of Sonic Youth’s guitar tunings insofar as both refract tired genres through skewed harmony and make them feel new again, whether rock or acoustic blues. Stark and ugly, quiet and static, early Jandek can sound almost shockingly empty. But the lyrics compute, the chords click despite dissonance, the aesthetic seems too distinct and too austere to have been settled on by accident, and the more I listen the more I wonder why this music, which is in fact extremely mannered, so succeeds at simulating primitivism. It’s not like all music would sound like Chair Beside a Window if stripped down--this album sounds like no music ever save Jandek’s own--but somehow, it creates that impression. Generic singer-songwriter misery sounds like Elliott Smith or Sufjan Stevens; it doesn’t sound like this. 

7. Follow Your Footsteps (1986)

Between his two loudest efforts he released this quiet, lovely pastoral daydream, in which he blisses out and stares at the wind rippling through wheat fields. “Jaws of Murmur” would fit nicely on the Feelies’ The Good Earth, released the same year.

8. On the Way (1988)

My favorite conceptual artist, sometimes my favorite singer-songwriter. He records a lot. He doesn’t put much effort into his music, preferring to just toss off songs at a breakneck level of productivity. His good songs are more powerful for their apparent inadvertence; it’s impossible to tell how much of any given performance is calculated or improvised, sentient or aleatory, whether he jotted down lyrics on a napkin five minutes before recording or just made them up on the fly. He confounds the illusion of intentionality. He has an unbecoming fondness for blues and Americana. His album covers seem to hide dead bodies just out of frame. He likes hats. Am I describing Jandek or Bob Dylan?

But Dylan is a famous person; his mirror moves are interesting partially for how they tease and gratify an audience, while Jandek signifies as a musician with no audience. Sending music out into the void from his isolation chamber, trying compulsively to express something but knowing neither how nor to whom, he communicates the minimum--no less, sometimes more. In this, he is quintessentially an ‘80s figure, testing how far from the spotlight one can retreat while remaining visible and how far one can advance without revealing oneself. Like Michael Stipe or Bernard Sumner, he is both there and not; he communicates but doesn’t. During a decade when megacelebrity ballooned, so did these weird publicity games. 

Is a good Jandek song good, or just good relative to Jandek? That depends--I love everything listed below. His acoustic ballads terrify, while his electric ensemble jams are often hysterically funny. Vice versa too! An artist capable of both “You Painted Your Teeth” and “I’ll Sit Alone And Think A Lot About You” deserves a loving playlist, so here’s mine. I can’t imagine any two fans picking the same material. 

1. Your Condition

2. Only Lover

3. Governor Rhodes

4. Mother’s Day Card

5. I’m Ready

6. Jaws of Murmur

7. I’ll Sit Alone And Think a Lot About You

8. The Cat That Walked From Shelbyville

9. I Passed By the Building

10. You Painted Your Teeth

11. I Want to Know Why

12. Twelve Seconds Since February 32nd

13. This Is a Death Dream

14. The Janitor

15. When the Telephone Melts

16. Your Other Man

17. European Jewel

18. Janky

19. Love, Love

20. Rifle in the Closet

21. All in an Apple Orchard

22. Babe I Love You

23. Ballad of Robert

24. Ha Ha

25. Star Up in the Sky

26. Mostly All From You

27. Voices in the Dark

28. Rain in Madison

29. Point Judith