| The Jacks - Vacant World |
| There
are a lot of opening one two punches in the rock world. Led Zeppelin
kicking out "Whole Lotta Love" before cooling down with "What Is And
What Should Never Be" on "II." King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid
Man" going into "I Talk To The Wind" on their debut. The Cure
flattening the landscape with "The Kiss" before sweetening up with
"Catch" on "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me." Then we've got the Jacks. If the Jacks had recorded nothing but empty blues covers after "Marianne" and "Stop The Clock" on their debut "Vacant World," we'd still be frothing at the mouth over them, fourty years later. "Marianne" is the stuff of legend: it's been covered by The Stalin's Michiro Endo, deeply influenced Les Rallizes Dénudés' Takeshi Mizutani, and has set the standard for pitch black desperation in the Japanese music scene ever since. The Jacks were obstensibly folk, but "Marianne" fits into no genre template I'm aware of. Free jazz drums open the track, simulating the waves of a story sea, as sinister guitar twangs its way into the condemned vocals of Jacks frontman Yoshio Hayakawa. The drums start pounding away, senslessly and relentlessly, before the song even hits the two minute mark, simultaneously ignoring and propelling the song into deeper and deeper pits of despair. The mention of depths and waves are not simply for show: Marianne is a sea spirit, compelling Hayakawa to jump in and surrender to death. This was in 1968. It's a jaw dropping song, made all the more twisted by the fact that it's followed by the utterly placid "Stop The Clock," a chillingly gorgeous lullaby that would be simply pretty in any other context. Here, it comes off as a death rattle, albeit a somewhat comforting one, and even now, hearing it again after who knows how many repeats, it inspires chills. Fortunately, The Jacks didn't simply fill the rest of the album with cheesy covers, as per the standard of the day. The title track is as dark as "Marianne," with a more resigned approach: less violence, more sorrow. The sun never seems to rise: even the more straightforward blues of "Gloomy Flower" (the title says it all,) or the less than optimistic sounding "Love Generation" offers no release. "Vacant World" in general is an amazingly powerful album, made all the more startling by it's date and the fact it's a debut. The band never topped this master stroke of gloom, although they didn't need to: their reputation was settled. |