Syd Barrett is the perfect hero figure for music fans of a certain age: he’s brilliant, mysterious, romantically tragic, and eternally young and beautiful. (Also: drugs.) But Jackson Scott’s interest in the troubled Pink Floyd founder goes beyond surfaces. On his debut, Melbourne, the North Carolina-based singer-songwriter attempts to locate his inner Barrett, aspiring to the dark whimsy and fractured melodies of Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the solo albums The Madcap Laughs and Barrett. It’s an admirable attempt at achieving a difficult goal-- for all their woozy tempos and “weird” affectations, Scott’s songs never quite reach the singularly unsettling depths of Barrett’s best music. He is, for better or worse, a different kind of artist.
That’s not to say that Jackson doesn’t have talent, or that Melbourne isn’t a winning introduction. Because he does, and the album most definitely is. Scott might not be the next Syd Barrett, but he could be a budding Rivers Cuomo. In an interview with Pitchfork back in April, Scott copped to his love of early Weezer and alt-rock in general. (While Scott’s music bears some superficial similarities with fellow southern psych-rock tunesmiths like Bradford Cox and Jeff Mangum, to whom he’s often been compared, he wasn’t weaned on Elephant 6 bands or indie-rock at all.) Sure enough, if you listen closely to Melbourne, what initially sounds like oddball 1960s pop gradually reveals itself to be something else. Though Scott lathers his songs in tape hiss and disembodied noise, but the songs themselves are straight-forward and hooky guitar jams.
Cuomo’s influence on Scott is apparent in the number of songs named women on Melbourne. “Evie” is one of the album’s prettiest songs, with Scott’s murmuring, wandering vocal anchored by a sturdy acoustic strum and lifted by a jangly electric lead. Also lovely is “Sandy”-- which refers to the Sandy Hook shootings-- which offsets the disturbing lyrics (“Little kids/ Sitting all around/ Wishing they were sound asleep again”) with a light shuffle and sighing backing vocals. “Sandy” is the closest that Scott gets to full-on lysergic creepiness on Melbourne; he’s most at home with sprawling, slow-burn rockers that climax with stunning six-string pyrotechnics. “That Awful Sound” stomps with surprising swagger after the tweeness of Melbourne’s opening tracks, with Scott’s smoldering guitar finally bubbling over for a searing mid-song solo. The Pixies-like “Together Forever” is a mini epic-- at 3:42, it’s the longest song on this fleet 12-track and 29-minute record-- that builds to a chorus of guitar feedback in the final minute.
While the melodies jump out of Melbourne and immediately assert themselves-- “Any Way” is the giddiest two-minute rock song you’ll hear this year-- Scott disguises his voice by pitch-shifting the vocals into various distorted shapes. It’s an intermittently successful approach, equal parts creepy and annoying, but the gimmickry adds little to the songs, which are strong enough to benefit from greater clarity and a more confident delivery. Scott already has his songwriting tools in place; once he finds his voice, look out.
