There were some fine songs on Jackson Scott’s proper 2013 debut, Melbourne, and the North Carolina singer/songwriter also fit a trustworthy archetype—the prolific slacker, or the ambitious, yet self-sabotaging auteur. While Ariel Pink and Bradford Cox and Mac DeMarco have become indie rock A-listers with serious influence, they too had to start somewhere, and Melbourne may have actually been more accomplished than some of their earliest releases. But Scott’s follow-up, Sunshine Redux, doesn’t just defy or confound expectations—it fails to acknowledge their existence.
It’s tempting and unfair to speculate on what Jackson Scott should’ve done here; he doesn’t owe the listener anything besides his best effort. But Scott wouldn’t even be in this position were it not for four-track charmers like "Sandy" or "Evie" or "That Awful Sound". Those songs had Scotchgard-huffing vocals, crackle and hiss, tape warping, but the sound effects weren't the source of their power: Scott’s strengths are in pop songwriting, not production. And Sunshine Redux does everything it can to bury his melodies, vocals, and lyrics in favor of… not much of anything, really.
Even more denatured and opaque than the soupy Melbourne, Sunshine Redux is self-produced to a gooey, garish, gritty and barely mobile gel—the sound of gum refusing to leave the bottom of your shoe. Considering the tools available to even the most novice and/or cash-strapped home recorder, one has to hear all of this as a protracted aesthetic choice rather than a result of economic necessity. And so the question throughout is, simply, why? Why does Scott subject his vocals to so many forms of disorientation when his indecisive melodies barely sound like they’re aware of their surroundings to begin with?
Peering into the lyrics only reinforces the confusion. As with the music, the words are vaguely surreal, inscrutable but one-dimensional. Coming from an acolyte of Syd Barrett, a song called "Merry Nightmare" hits squarely on the nose. In the preceding song, he revisits the juxtaposition of whimsy and brutal violence from "Sandy", but the utter blankness of "Save the World" makes its Dr. Seuss-quoting chorus ("Oh the places that you’ll go/ When you’re far too young to know") come off like a Korn-y gimmick.
Had Sunshine Redux preceded Melbourne, perhaps it could be heard as the work of an immature artist trying to develop a feel for songwriting voice and production. Or, like the hundreds of passable records of crudely recorded psych-pop to which it’s comparable, perhaps it wouldn’t be heard at all. But Scott seemed like he was already beyond that. There’s one lyric from "PRPLMTV" that could be read as introspective—but "when you went to college to blossom in folly/ You took lots of molly," is Scott making a nonchalant cop to being a dude who isn’t much interested in meeting expectations. Melbourne wanted us to believe that Jackson Scott was subverting pop. Here, he’s just subverting himself.
