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Earth Sound System by Jackie O Motherfucker reviewed by pitchfork — 5.6/10 | Wavelength | Wavelength

Wavelength

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pitchfork

Earth Sound System

Earth Sound System

Jackie O Motherfucker (2011)

5.6/ 10

“Latest from the long-running Portland collective maintains the group's experimental streak but loses some of the tension that defined its best work.”

I want to live Jackie-O Motherfucker. I want to quit my pretty good downtown job and follow the band around Europe. I want to trade poorly recorded tapes with other superfans and scoff mightily at the non-believers. This is the type of devotion JOMF should inspire. To date, the long-running Portland collective's scabrous interpretation of Americana has been appropriately grimy and confrontational: Bandleader Tom Greenwood is the odds-on favorite to shiv a Fleet Fox. Lately, though, the band's increasingly tame albums haven't lived up to its reputation.

Earth Sound System is structurally similar to recent JOMF offerings-- Valley of Fire, Ballads of the Revolution-- in that it features a handful of tracks split between extended improvisations and disarmingly straightforward electric balladry. JOMF have remained noisy, but tragically, they've discovered organization. The first track on Earth Sound System, "In the Willows", features Greenwood mumbling over bent chords, like a grounded, broken-winged Spiritualized. The next track, "Raga Joining", is a scraping jam, a drum machine bursting out of a flute in a rug warehouse.

The songs, especially, sound cursory. Perhaps this is due to familiarity, once-fresh ideas that now seem rote. But I don't think so. JOMF used to build tracks around ideas, around snippets of speech or old hymns: They had ties to history, a history that JOMF were either besmirching or honoring (or both) with their treatments. Valley of Fire, for instance, featured two long tracks, one tethered to a ramshackle funk sermon and the other a tribute-- however tenuous-- to a Public Enemy song. But Greenwood's voice, a distinctly 1990s strain of off-key alt-troubadour, offers no such tether to the past.

The concepts that were brilliantly muddled in Greenwood's mind-- noisenik gristle, folksong, skronky improvisation-- are now compartmentalized. The impulse is understandable: Greenwood is hardly the first artist to appropriate traditional songcraft before wanting to try his hand at it. But the songs on Earth Sound System lack the purpose of their inspiration. They lack even the dark hippie rhetoric the band is most capable of. When the band attempts bracing garage rock on the closing "Where We Go", they suck their air out of the room with their hoary posturing.

Earth Sound System offers a different vision of JOMF, but a lesser one. Greenwood and co.'s impulses have grown disappointingly easy to dissect. The result is music that, by any definition, remains experimental and difficult, but the invigorating internal tension between the ordained simplicity of American musics and the free-will noise jams has evaporated. It's possible to appreciate Earth Sound System merely for its mossy overgrowth, but I'm not quitting my day job.

I want to live Jackie-O Motherfucker. I want to quit my pretty good downtown job and follow the band around Europe. I want to trade poorly recorded tapes with other superfans and scoff mightily at the non-believers. This is the type of devotion JOMF should inspire. To date, the long-running Portland collective's scabrous interpretation of Americana has been appropriately grimy and confrontational: Bandleader Tom Greenwood is the odds-on favorite to shiv a Fleet Fox. Lately, though, the band's increasingly tame albums haven't lived up to its reputation. *Earth Sound System* is structurally similar to recent JOMF offerings-- *Valley of Fire*, *Ballads of the Revolution*-- in that it features a handful of tracks split between extended improvisations and disarmingly straightforward electric balladry. JOMF have remained noisy, but tragically, they've discovered organization. The first track on *Earth Sound System*, "In the Willows", features Greenwood mumbling over bent chords, like a grounded, broken-winged Spiritualized. The next track, "Raga Joining", is a scraping jam, a drum machine bursting out of a flute in a rug warehouse. The songs, especially, sound cursory. Perhaps this is due to familiarity, once-fresh ideas that now seem rote. But I don't think so. JOMF used to build tracks around ideas, around snippets of speech or old hymns: They had ties to history, a history that JOMF were either besmirching or honoring (or both) with their treatments. *Valley of Fire*, for instance, featured two long tracks, one tethered to a ramshackle funk sermon and the other a tribute-- however tenuous-- to a Public Enemy song. But Greenwood's voice, a distinctly 1990s strain of off-key alt-troubadour, offers no such tether to the past. The concepts that were brilliantly muddled in Greenwood's mind-- noisenik gristle, folksong, skronky improvisation-- are now compartmentalized. The impulse is understandable: Greenwood is hardly the first artist to appropriate traditional songcraft before wanting to try his hand at it. But the songs on *Earth Sound System* lack the purpose of their inspiration. They lack even the dark hippie rhetoric the band is most capable of. When the band attempts bracing garage rock on the closing "Where We Go", they suck their air out of the room with their hoary posturing. *Earth Sound System* offers a different vision of JOMF, but a lesser one. Greenwood and co.'s impulses have grown disappointingly easy to dissect. The result is music that, by any definition, remains experimental and difficult, but the invigorating internal tension between the ordained simplicity of American musics and the free-will noise jams has evaporated. It's possible to appreciate *Earth Sound System* merely for its mossy overgrowth, but I'm not quitting my day job.