Rainy Morning, Humboldt with The Jackets

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.