Jackie O Motherfucker

Tom Greenwood's experimental folk/noise/improv outfit changes depending on who's in it, so you never know exactly what to expect when you put a new one on the player. Earth Sound System is quite a lot mellower than the last one I spent time with (Freedom Land), shading into the Appalachian shadowiness of bands like MV+EE and Sunburned Hand in spots, but turning a good bit more experimental and prickly on the two long raga tracks ("Raga Joining" and "Raga Separating"). It's all pretty great, though...

This time out, Greenwood is working with two of the guys from Eternal Tapestry, Nick and Jed Bindeman on guitar and drums, as well as Brian Mumford on guitars and home-made electronics.

Here's "In the Willows"

Somebody else reviews the new JOMF at Dusted

You can’t write about friends at Dusted, or at least you’re not supposed to. In fact, you’re not supposed to write about people you occasionally exchange emails with or see around town which, for me, probably knocks out Michael Yonkers, Reid Paley, Chris Brokaw, Amargosa, Black Swans and the Man Man dudes…But mostly, it excludes my friend Michael Dustdevil, who plays a fairly prominent role on the new Jackie-O Motherfucker record, reviewed by Daniel Levin Baker today at Dusted.


Hey, at least someone did it. He says:

Jackie-O Motherfucker is, at this point, one of life’s little inevitabilities. We can just kind of assume that Tom Greenwood, with a revolving cast of wayfarers who do their time with him in between more refined/less catchall projects (see Adam Forkner and Honey Owens, for two), will continue to follow some erratic astral muse, and that we’ll never go for too long without a new slab of exemplary industrio-rural drone to chew on, some more infallible, sun-deprived grooves for our campfires in outer space. No good reason to want it any other way.

The rest

JOMF...the band with the unmentionable name

Being a middle aged football/skiing/track mom who writes about underground music is kind of a balancing act. As a writer, you're allowed -- almost required -- to swear and be cynical and allude to all kinds of contraband ideas. As a mom, you are supposed to behave yourself and not make too much embarrassing trouble. You are not allowed to have CDs on in the car with too much bad language. You should probably not have CD covers in places your kid's friends can see that have naked women on them or words like "motherfucker."

Ahem...today's review is of a really excellent band called Jackie O Motherfucker. (Some of you may know that my friend Michael has been playing with them lately and mastering their CDs and so forth, but he is not on this particular record.)
Sorry, Sean, I'll try to be more conventional next week.

Artist: Jackie O Motherfucker
Album: Freedomland
Label: Very Friendly
Review date: Oct. 9, 2008
Freedomland documents a series of live performances by the summer 2006 incarnation of Jackie O Motherfucker, an outfit centered around guitarist and turntablist Tom Greenwood, but with a rotating cast of supporting members. This version of JOMF is a particularly incendiary one, jettisoning the gentler folkier experiments of the Theo Angell/Samara Lubielski years, and focusing instead on a noisy, freely improvised clatter and storm.

The impetus for the shift is likely Inca Ore’s Eve Salens, who also sang with JOMF on 2006’s Valley of Fire. She is an extraordinarily volatile presence here, caterwauling and moaning and free-associating through a minefield of explosive sounds. Utterly unconstrained, she has a speaking-in-tongues quality that encourages everyone else in the band to greater levels of cacophony. Consider for instance, the relatively accessible opening track "Devotion" where she chants "You know devotion," over and over at escalating volumes. As she approaches catharsis, the drummer, Danny Sasaki, follows right along with her, his pounding coalescing into an almost continuous barrage. The guitars, too, erupt into jagged masses of discord, underlining the chaotic crescendo. The lyrics seem almost random. They are delivered in a flat sing-song with odd syllables emphasized. And yet, the excitement is palpable.

The whole review


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