June 29, 1999
Remember when, in the old Monty Python TV series, they would briefly cut to a nude guy with a Don King hairdo and an ingratiating grin playing the organ? Combine him with the one-man-band Dick Van Dyke played in Mary Poppins - you remember, with the drum on his back, the harmonica in his mouth and the accordion - and you have what I picture in my head when Jeremy J. Jacobson (The Lonesome Organist) is playing.
Chicago indie label Thrill Jockey is best known for broadcasting icy post-rock around the globe, but this man is the weirdest thing in their catalog, and that's saying something. It's also infinitely more visceral: songs like "Balloon Race Phenomenon" were recorded live to two-track, with Jacobson bashing out a feverish pulse on drums while riffing on organ simultaneously. I hear his live shows are mind-blowing flights of coordination as he wrestles up to five instruments at once and tap dances to boot.
This record, however, finds him using the studio a bit more as the staggeringly talented multi-instrumentalist layers tracks of guitar, saxophone, piano, mandolin, singing saw and more on top of his distinctively eerie carnival drones. "Cranked Up Too Hard" is just that, an amusingly creepy barroom piano providing the soundtrack to an imaginary Ed Wood-directed Western flick populated by ghouls. Any style ever played on 88 keys is evident here, from ragtime to barrelhouse to boogie-woogie to cartoonish twiddling to John Cage prepared weirdness to "New Age Vamp" vibraphone. "Dirty Plight" has him singing in a swinging growl, "Vibe Sequencer" takes Caribbean steel drums into a Transylvania castle and "All of Those Dirty Swine" is an evil campfire country tune. File next to Tom Waits' The Black Rider for those nights when you want to cut free from sanity and groove to some weird-ass sounds. For the adventurous only.
- Jared O'Connor
weird-ass sounds