Send "Jackie" Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 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....full text |
| Musicomh |
| It's been a long, involved, convoluted but always compelling development that "cult Portland, Oregon psychedelicists" Jackie-O Motherfucker has undergone. In the 14 previous albums to date since their 1995 inception, the band have run the gamut of experimental sounds, from soft nature-drenched skewed balladry to challenging drone and improvisatory. Now in one of their most settled and established line-ups they bring us Earth Sound System, following on from 2009's terrific Ballads Of The Revolution. Where will their ongoing journey take us next? As before, the band once again only furnish us with six tracks this time round. Rather than the cohesive offering you would expect from more conventional musicians, there seems to be quite a marked division in play here between contrasting song "types". Opening track In The Willows typifies the first type. The quiet acoustic guitar with which it is ushered in sets the tone for a soft gentle piece, downbeat and lovelorn. Drawing from pastoral images ("the willows", "endless wind" "rain of tears"), this is a dour tale of regret, nostalgia and heartbreak, as the singer recalls his lost love who "gathered the sun all in her fist / gathered the moon all around her wrist". The vocal is sombre, drawling yet quavering all at once, and some of the imagery is striking, for all its pessimism: "clouds are shaped like disaster". In a similar vein are Bring It To Me and Dedication. The former – perhaps referencing Sam Cooke's much-covered soul standard Bring It On Home To Me (these precise lyrics are used at one point) - is another gentle acoustic romance, once more tinted with allusions to nature ("smells of apples and grass"). The voice here is warmer, more engaged, more human-seeming and intimate, with the busier (twangy, rattly, synth-flecked) backing serving as a counterpoint to the melody....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| Since 1995 and across more than a dozen releases, Jackie-O Motherfucker has evolved, in a crooked sort of way, from a free-form psych-jazz outfit into a mostly-acoustic Americana-tinged project. As might be expected given the prolific nature of the group, the results haven’t always been consistent, with group leader Tom Greenwood the only constant element, and this restless spirit leads to both wins and losses. At its best, JOMF can take what might be a tired form in other hands, and imbue it with new life through imaginative recombination and new direction. Alas, the new Earth Sound System is a particularly undecided record, offering two disparate approaches that make no attempt to cohere. The caveat "your mileage may vary" has rarely been so applicable. On the one hand, there are the quiet singsong tunes, primarily acoustic guitar with droning electrics in the background while Greenwood intones hippie poetry atop the proceedings. On the flip side are the two long, freeform pieces, "Raga Joining" and "Raga Separating". Aside from raising the question of whether a raga is whatever you decide to call it, these come across like undirected Nurse With Wound outtakes. Random electronic percussion and blended drone and chaos, they’re not unenjoyable but in the overall context of the album, they feel like an attempted counterbalance to the singsong ditties, as if to say "See, we’re experimental, too!" The acoustic songs suffer from what feels like a general malaise, as if Greenwood lacked the energy to really care -- they sound like first takes recorded in a couple of hours, then shipped off. The singing is more than uneven, wobbly and uncaring, and when "Bring It To Me" locks into the same lyric over and over and over, the skip button is difficult to resist. Greenwood sounds like he doesn’t really give a damn. Sadly, that leads into "Dedication," which is six minutes of off-key repetition: "This is dedicated to / the person who / is trying to find / the next right thing to do" -- over and over and over and over. The intention might have been a mantra-like hypnotic feel, but it simply doesn’t work. The song is nearly impossible to see through to the end. Closer "Where We Go" is the pleasant surprise. Someone must have handed Greenwood and the band some caffeine, because this rougher song displays the energy that’s missing elsewhere on the album. It rolls along over a churning rhythm section and cascading fuzzed-out guitar while Greenwood chants and hollers, and the band feel like they finally found something to care about....full text |
Jackie lyrics
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