Paul Jacobs’ cartoon world is constantly expanding. Since uprooting himself from the border city of Windsor, Ontario to the perpetually buzzing Montreal music scene, his hand-drawn animations and hallucinatory illustrations have graced the covers of multiple albums per year. As the drummer of post-punk quintet Pottery, Jacobs is the engine behind yelpy extended jams that sound equally at home on a nightclub dancefloor or at a psych festival. Yet it’s solo albums like Pink Dogs on the Green Grass where Jacobs’ soft-focus, lysergic visions truly bloom.
Before moving to Windsor, Jacobs grew up in the even smaller town of Leamington, a city recently making headlines for drug busts and lockdown non-compliances. At age 4, he started playing drums in the church where his mom worked as a cleaner, but could only find hardcore and death metal groups to join in the sparse local scene. By necessity, Jacobs first emerged in the early 2010s as a one-man band, stomping out echo-drenched garage-rock reminiscent of Thee Oh Sees. As Jacobs’ discography grew, so did his songwriting ambitions, with 2016’s Pictures, Movies & Apartments providing an early glimpse at a tuneful side under smears of no-fi shoegaze.
Now that Jacobs has reinvented himself as a psych-pop troubadour, the simplest comparisons are probably Kurt Vile’s pretty daze and White Fence’s trippy haze, but it’s Cass McCombs he has namechecked as an enduring inspiration. Pink Dogs on the Green Grass bursts at the seams with twinkly keys, acoustic jangle, and clopping bongos, accentuating its sly hooks with sounds from a Summer of Love revival. Winnowing down 40 half-finished demos to 13 overstuffed songs, Jacobs handed the album off to mastering engineer Oliver Ackermann from A Place to Bury Strangers, a band that has made a career out of finding the sweet spot within squalls of noise.
Jacobs’ lyrics drift between banal observations and an oddball cast of characters, pushing his songs into surreal realms. The bongo-propelled “Christopher Robbins” reimagines the Air America author as a boss writing his paychecks. Moody standout “Cherry” is Jacobs’ tribute to the color red, while “Most Delicious Drink” is his ode to a beverage “that you wish would last forever.” Midway through spoken-word groover “Dancing With the Devil,” he stops to shop for “that brand new pair of shoes I had my eye on,” before his voice becomes garbled like crank-call auteur Longmont Potion Castle.
“Half Rich Loner” is the album’s closest hint at autobiography, with first-person lyrics describing the defeated thoughts of a middle-class working stiff who harbors artistic ambitions. As the song choogles on a single guitar note, Jacobs waxes depressedly: “This town has got me under some sort of spell/I was the half rich no good for nothing/Never amount to anything, never going to make it.” But is it really so bad to build new worlds on his lonesome if there’s no one else around? “When I’m not feeling music I can spend a lot of time drawing,” Jacobs has said. “When I was younger I definitely spent most of my time building skate ramps and stuff like that. It’s all the same, to just create and not trap yourself in your own head.”
Buy: Rough Trade
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