The singer-songwriter Jackie West belongs to a loose group of indie rock musicians orbiting New York City and the clutch of upstate towns that have threatened to become an unofficial sixth borough since COVID. That group includes Adeline Hotel frontman Dan Knishkowy, who plays guitar on West’s spellbinding second album, Silent Century. Katie Von Schleicher, another quietly hypnotic singer-songwriter, lends some light synth and background vocals to West’s compositions, while Nate Mendelsohn blows breath into some single, whisper-quiet saxophone lines. But Silent Century is a spotlight for two things: West’s wayward, darting mind, and her droning guitar, steady as a coursing river.
West builds most of the songs around a single repeated chord, strummed high up on the neck. Her band populates the arrangement with everything else she needs—bass licks, chord changes, dynamic surges—while West sends her voice into the song’s darkened corners and curls her mind around whichever odd idea grips her.
The alluring songs on Silent Century throw off different hazily familiar shapes every time I listen: Mazzy Star, Waxahatchee, Hand Habits, Faye Webster, Aldous Harding, Slowdive—anything dreamy and dilated with a pinprick at its center. The pinprick, in West’s case, arrives via her lyrics, which consistently lob compelling insights into the songs’ squall and shimmer like slowly hurtling space junk.
“I sell my body for amazing prices/It’s easier than climbing the staircase or taking off my shirt,” she sings on the title track. Does this line, devoid of context, make sense? No, it doesn’t. But imagine if it floated your way from across a crowded room. Would you not feel compelled to follow this odd remark to its source, to discover more about the mind that generated it?
West doesn’t make herself easy to track. On “Overlooking Glass,” she merges her voice with her droning guitar until they dissolve into each other, drawing out word “chaos” into one long, euphonious, two-syllable phoneme. On “Thunder Ideal,” she breaks off the song’s narrative to simply sing, in alternation, “the rain, the light.” That’s it: just the rain, just the light.
The further West steps out from beneath the half-light of her arrangements, the more intriguing she becomes. She begins the song “Thunder Ideal” with this guileless lyric: “It’s so ideal/When you tell me how you feel/What goes on with you inside/I like that you don't want to hide.” Typed out, it reads a bit like first-grader’s poetry, but West strings out the lines over pulsing-heartbeat guitars until each word sounds vaguely nonsensical. Suddenly, pablum becomes prophecy.
The final song, “Offer,” is the album’s loosest, wildest moment and its most exciting. The song, which runs over nine minutes, feels exactly like what it is: a weird and electrifying single take that sprouted wings, horns, a tail, and galloped all over the studio until it became undeniable. “Offer” isn’t a drone, but the band rides the simple I-vi-IV-V chord progression so deeply into the ground that it becomes one.
As the band shifts into its locked groove, West alternates between singing and what can really only be described as rambling: “It’s really a shame that we let Socrates die—but did we really?” “What do you do when somebody hurts you? That’s really painful. It’s so painful. Somebody hurts you…They didn’t know. Maybe they don’t even know.” She gets off some good zingers at her own expense: “I’m buying seven-dollar coffees and I’m complaining about how much money I spend on recording the music.” She asks herself questions that most people don’t verbalize in public: “Am I a megalomaniac for believing in myself like this?” As the song churns on, the focus narrows in on West until everything else falls away. Everyone’s left the party, except for you and West, and she’s boring her inquisitive eyes right into you.
