Distinguished by a sort of homespun musical ingenuity and front-porch experimentation, the Baptist Generals’ new album, Jackleg Devotional to the Heart, sounds like it’s built out of beer bottles, tin cans, lengths of rusted chain, assorted junkyard scraps, and unidentifiable whatchamabobs. Opener “Machine en Prolepsis” rigs a squelchy synth and a percussive acoustic strum into a whirligig rhythm that spins on pure gumption. “Oblivion” turns what sounds like incidental music from a home movie into a gyroscopic finale, ending in a rousing finale when the guitars and keyboards spin faster and faster. The song sounds like it might just overheat and explode, but the Generals manage to keep a lid on everything. Barely.
It’s the Denton, Texas-based outfit’s first album in a full decade, which suggests a get-to-it-when-I-get-to-it attitude toward the creative process and a dismissive attitude toward the music business. In fact, they trashed at least one attempt at a follow-up, and the album they finally thought well enough of to release is so different from No Silver / No Gold that it might as well be a fresh debut. It’s all too easy to romanticize this sort of art-for-art’s-sake mentality, especially when it comes from deep in the heart of Texas. However, lacking both the demonstrative lo-fi sprawl of its predecessor and the hermetic perfectionism that often marks long-gestating albums, Jackleg really does sound like the Baptist Generals made it first and foremost for themselves.
If that means it’s occasionally self-indulgent, fine. They sound like they take no small pleasure in fashioning the pinwheel rhythms on “Dog That Bit You”, setting them against Chris Flemmons’ scratchy vocal melodies, and creating something distinctive and unusual. As a result, Jackleg succeeds even when its musical resourcefulness is undermined by Flemmons’ overwrought lyrics. His reliance on antiquated language and poetic phrasing suggests a self-consciously old weird America rather than inhabiting the new weird one. Exactly as ridiculous as its title, “Clitorpus Christi” is a story-song without much of a story: The narrator talks about hiring a prostitute and not taking showers, but never gets around to having a point. It might be less of a sore spot if Jackleg Devotional took up that point of view again or if the Baptist Generals could find a way to couch it in a larger narrative.
Fighting against the song’s inconsequentiality is the singer’s adenoidal rasp, which recalls that of fellow Dentonite Will Johnson. Flemmons doesn’t quite have the Centro-Matic frontman’s expressive range, but to his credit he gives himself over fully to his characters. Arguably his best moment on Jackleg Devotional comes toward the end of “Snow on the FM”, when Flemmons elects to sing a string of la la la’s against a steady acoustic guitar theme. By delivering sound instead of words, his voice becomes purely instrumental-- one cog in a fascinating contraption of sound.
