There is something to be said for a band that you are able to fall in love with just because of what they seem like on paper, their ideas, their essence and their exotic nature. A band built around three siblings may not be that new but when they are split between Manila and Chicago then you are moving into much more interesting territory. And look at the album titles; anything that references Bukowski is going to make serial library card wielders like myself take notice and the fact that their debut album was amazingly titled Who’s Listening to Van Gogh’s Ear? is just the academic icing on the surrealist cake.
But admiring from afar is one thing, meeting your newfound heroes is quite another. I may admire the clothes this new exotic musical stranger dresses in, but do I like them as a person…the needle drop test as it used to be called.
The answer is simply no. I don’t like them. I love them! I loooove them!
The album wanders through glitchy, electronic enhanced dark experimentations, lurching from razor wire, clinical rock onslaughts to Lynchian film scores, ambient dream-pop as envisaged by dying computers to futuristic dance moves.
But this is dance music built from the detritus found scattered across an industrial wasteland, all sharp edges and jagged design and driven by a dark apocalyptic narrative and searing sparks. It is the white-hot groove of factory noise being rendered onto the nightclub floor, but not the club that just anyone can find. This one is probably in a decaying warehouse or dead car plant miles away from civilization and possibly even in some sort of parallel universe, and as the clock strikes thirteen this is the sound which hits the sky for probably the last party before the end of the world.
It is an album that is as strange and otherworldly as it is forward thinking and inspiring. It is strangely poetic in its own bleak and terrible way, and brilliant in the way it seems to assimilate and warp recognisable musical genres to its own dystopian will.
Not much music these days feels like a glimpse of the future, most feels like the here and now just trying a bit to hard to get the jump on its rivals for commercial reasons. Jack of None, however, sound like an on coming techno-storm, one which will level current trends and usher in a whole new brutal scene. Their music has that quality of chilling you to the bone but as we know from all good horror movies, you can’t help but watch until the end. And by then, for some it will be too late….
