There are not nearly enough bands thrashing around in museums of ancient, crude antique instruments nowadays. Back in the 1700s, America was full of lunatic crackpot politican-trapper-scientists picking up pinecones and sawblades, inadvertantly producing a music that reeks of old oak and raven cries. Jackie-O Motherfucker offers a brand of music that hasn’t been seen since Louis and Clark, wrapping all their epic 17-minute jams in drool-leaking coffins of glory. While the first few tracks remind our guilt-ridden consciouses of simpler times, like third-grade when xylophone music ruled the classroom and filled our ears with melodic, yet harsh, metallic sounds. The later tracks are as menacing and grating as nails upon cheesegraters, submerged in coughing and lecherous old men and barrells full of chiming locusts. This clearly must be a re-release from the horse-and-buggy days of 1999 before the Motherfucker got huge on the indie-rock circuit, selling their cracked planks of guitar for Honda dealerships. Sell-outs!
The double-CD that includes two long-out-of-print releases sounds like they’re alternately choking on their own fecal matter, as the percussion stomps along like a crazed teenybopping elephant. The flailing cacophonies are like mashing every intellectual concept since 1900 into a blender and turning it on grind — it works as well as putting Mr. Toad, our old swampland friend, and hitting the chop button. It doesn’t always work, yet it never feels anything less than learning a new language after your mouth has just been loaded with Ivory soap formed in the geodisic era. Seriously though, this album isn’t an album at all; it’s a brain-hurricane launched into a psychedelic carnival barker land of make-believe ear-pleasing wood shackles.
Archived article by ZAM Linagones