After the more than successful return to the Avant-Pog of “The Warm, Dark Circus”, Damon Waitkus dusts off the more attitude folk-pop orientedproposing a collection of seventeen songs found on old ribbons and at the time discarded as they are not considered adequate to the stylistic profile of the jacks or the clock.
The author dissects his soul and rereads with the awareness of maturity: original texts and parts have been eliminated (only three songs have kept some sentences: “Isolation Booth”, “The Gardener” and “It's Hard to Find Booze on Sunday”), being the lyrics of the time at the origin of the contempt of the same author for the material preserved for years and then abandoned.
The files in WAV format, thanks to a friend of Damon Waitkus who was in possession of the adapt files of the time, “Portraits” has definitively made form with new texts and in full respect of the intriguing and complex interactions between violin, bass, guitar and battery of the compositions.
The limits placed by the song format and the most nature casual Of the original arrangements, dating back to 2003, they offered Waitkus an opportunity to make use of the intense synergy with the recent conformation of the band, and it is precisely the variables (dulcimer, bundle, flute etc.) offered by the other members of the jacks or 'The Clock (the latest arrivals Kate McLaughlin and Victor Reynolds) the strength of “Portraits”.
In the carousel of styles that animates the album, the frantic folk-rock of “I'm ok, you're a shithead” and the energetic guitar scratch with the prog-rock contours of the fierce “Puer 1” are shine of their own light, but also the most typical folk-prog excursions of the band seem to have an unprecedented graceful, with a balance between the voice and the tools that keeps the tools Certune unnerving dissonances, to the advantage of brilliant rhythmic intuitions that play with the graces of minimalism (“Nature Abhors a Vacuum”) or incursions in the neoclassical and art-folk territory with intense psychedelic fragrances (“Year of the Gypsy Moths”, “Windigo Knocking”).
However, it remains difficult to translate the creative universe of the jacks or the clock into words (a Wire critic opted for a mix among the Pearls Before Swine and Weather Report), a band that has always been in the balance between a grotesque comedy-folk style (“My life's Not Wasted”, “In The Gold Coin Saloon”), a decadentism almost noir (“Lazy Tom Bog”) and improbable momentum towards the Aor (“The Gardener”), all performed with a technical skill that has often pushed musicians as two thirds of Fred Frith Frith Trio to be part of the project.
America told by the band is a set of surreal characters and stories, which well describes the inconsistencies and dystopias of a society poised between imperialism and democracy, and this feeling of continuous loss is the creative fulcrum of a disc that amalgamates with class and folk authority, prog, jazz, avant -garde and song format, with results that have few equal (“isolation booth”, “Josephine's Fresh Cuts”, “Another Sunny Day/Star of Monster”).
10/05/2025
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
