Driving south on the 101. Heading into Eureka, CA.
Rainy. Cold. Morning. Sun is just starting to rise behind the clouds, but it
won’t be seen for hours. The Jackets’ Shadows
of Sound is playing on my car’s stereo.
What one needs to know about the Voodoo Rhythm Records release is simple.
It’s a trio from Bern, Switzerland that formed in 2007. It’s singer/guitarist
is Jackie Brutsche, a strong a frontwoman as any band could want. It was
recorded at Circo Perrotti, which only really matters to musicians, but if you
know the name you know why it’s important.
Simple. Just like the day.
I’m going to Eureka. Lately, many people have been
fleeing from it. Most have taken flight to Los Angeles or Las Vegas. Two
entertainment hubs. Two places where dreams go to flourish or die. Some have
opted for points north. They Great White Way, with lots of emphasis on white. Either
way, The Jackets, I think, is the perfect soundtrack for the thoughts on the
thoughts on the journey.
From the opening track, “Don’t Turn Yourself In,”
there is one word that comes to mind. “Fuzz.” It tells you all you need. That
fuzz sticks throughout the album. Guitars at their fuzziest. You either dig the
sound or you don’t. I dig.
Garage rock, with a hint of the good ol’ fashioned
punk spirit, is worn by The Jackets not so much like a badge of honor, but a
birthright. Often caricatured, but rarely parodied, garage rock, The Jackets’
forte, is primitive and pure enough that it keeps capitalist jackals at bay as
it is hard to co-op. It’s not a sound that works for selling Jeeps. It’s a
sound as simple as a Hanna-Barbara cartoon, and if you remember some of those
you can recall whenever a garage rock-type was in one of them they were the
aforementioned caricatured creations. Hair in the eyes. Simple lines. Creepy.
Outcasts. Misfits, but not the
Misfits. There was a mystique about them. To the adults they sounded like
fools, but to the kids they offered sage wisdom, and welcomed their tiny souls
into the unknown. Some of us went willingly. Others ended up bopping to Hanson.
Looking at the eye makeup worn by Brutsche, it brings
back the memories of those cartoons with the promise of something new. In many
ways, she encapsulates why those people are fleeing Eureka. It is an allure of
the savage. The appeal of the primate. Fight and flight. Her eyes can be seen
from afar … and they frighten.
After the musical flea circus of the 1990s and 2000s,
I can’t help but think that music is devolving as it is evolving. An expanding
universe that is also pulling back into itself. A feat of quantum mechanics
that exists only in theories and vague ideas mumbled by the scientific elite.
From that nexus of garbage music which dominated the airwaves in that 20 years
of vapid tunes, music went back to the basics with bands like The Jackets and
forward into an aural soundscape both ambient and anxiety ridden, as
exemplified by the continuing output from Non. One only has to look at the
movie Mandy to see how sound can
inspire love and dread.
Mandy,
ironically, took place in the Pacific Northwest, that Great White Way. It is a
land where fuzzed out guitars are as at home as the tall redwoods loved equally
by tree huggers and tree killers. The movie and The Jackets could not exist in
the inner city poverty project of a place like Harlem. Primitive rock, which at
one time had a home there, no longer belongs on those streets. Eureka, no
stranger to garage rock, has evolved, too. It may be losing its artist elite,
but others will replace them. This place of certain opposites is bound to
create more of them. The Jackets, it should go without saying, would find an
audience and a home here. People would go to see the trio without ever having
to hear a muddied note. We’re that kind of folks.
When friends and acquaintances first started leaving,
it begged the question of why. Why now? Why there? Los Angeles is plastic
fantastic. Las Vegas is gaudy gauze. Oregon is gone. The answer, which came to
me during track “Watch You Cry,” seems simple now. They are pursuing dreams
that stagnated here. Fresh air. Fresh ideas. Fresh pain. Watch you cry is no
longer a song, but a promise. Humboldt, it has been said, always welcomes you
back, however. And if it’s your first time, we guarantee you won’t forget us.
You can’t escape no matter how hard you try.
Jorge Explosion produced Shadows of Sound. Nothing digital. Nothing unpure. Three musicians
and the truth. U2 had it wrong all along. The Jackets formed in 2007, right at
the end of the musical death decades. It flourished. It grew. It produced this
third album, recorded in Spain without the aid of computers, and became the
stuff of legends. 11 tracks. The soundtrack to running away while staying in
place. If the Empire is dying, this is the party music that is playing.
Pulling into Eureka it’s no surprise that traffic
congests right near the Burger King and McDonald’s. Amongst the pick-ups caked
with mud and the Prius doing its best, The Jackets remind me of being younger
and realizing you can create your own reality. Those who never knew that world
will continue traveling south to L.A. or Lost Wages. Whatever happens in Vegas,
stays there, however. Whatever happens here can be inbred or exported, and its
creators will never care. The Jackets embody that same attitude. That Prius
doing its best? It’s got an old faded Feel the Bern sticker. The Jackets formed
in Bern. The irony is not lost on this soul.
But then again, I was never one to run … and the
dreams pursue me.
