It's been said an inestimable number of times by an inestimable number of reviewers that "reviewing a Jandek album is hard." In fact, it's become almost a de rigeur choice of phrase whenever one of these mini-gospels from the proverbial twilight zone of the musical universe floats into the mailbox of some unsuspecting (or, by this point, suspecting and probably very prepared) reviewer. Either through the undeniable "character" that is projected (purposefully or otherwise) by the figure of the real life Jandek or through their own idealization of the mysterious figure, people have constructed an image of Jandek's music as being a sort of great "other," a sort of final frontier of mystery, one of the last bastions of honesty and simplicity in music today. Jandek is undoubtedly a modern day mythmaker; at least, that is how I've always thought of him. A nameless, unnameable Homer, transmitting his odes and epics to the masses.
His 52nd (who's still really counting?) album, appropriately titled The Myth of Blue Icicles and released by Corwood Industries, is, to be as precise as possible, a Jandek album. All the classical Jandek marks are present: the tangled acoustic guitar that manages to clash with itself; the deep, cat-scratchy vocals that sound like they were only achieved after a lifetime of swallowing sandstorms; and the lyrics that are part-confessional, part-epic poetry, and part-one-half of a conversation that might be ruined were we to hear the other half. Jandek manages to be on the razor's edge of what music is, what music means, while at the same time being one of the steadiest, most dependable artists in the whole of today's musical landscape. He manages to create some of the most inscrutable, arcane walls of sound, while giving us the sense that we could not possibly be closer to the center of the producer. Even if it were possible, it might be the kind of experience that would put everyone involved in some type of danger.
Essentially, The Myth of Blue Icicles feels like both progress and regression, but what else is new? One new feeling that we can't help getting on this album, especially when the first lines out of the wizard's mouth are "I’m sorry I must have appeared too coarse/ And unrefined/ I must have seemed like an animal/ And a clumsy one too/But you had some endurance and so did I," is the feeling that he knows us, and that the mind behind the curtain is, in some way, reaching out.
More about: Jandek
