Review: Jack Shirt 'Silent Beef'
Pretty much every LP we get our hands on, we can liken it to somethin' else. After receiving 'Silent Beef' by Jack Shirt, we're not so sure. See, what we have here is an album that does kinda sound like other stuff... but most of the things it sounds like aren't actually LPs.
Lookin' at the sleeve, of a disembodied doll head and the dastardly swine who did it tryin' to make a quick getaway, you should've really been given a clue that this was going to be an odd rekkid... one with murderous tendencies... but it's not until the slash 'n' grab groove enters your ear that you discover just how murderous the groove really is...
It's a good job Charlie Manson is locked up. Serious. If he heard this LP, he'd be now filled with secret codes, misinterpreted from basslines and the like, ready to kickstart a race-war or sumpin'. Reading the tracklisting is enough to make my mind go a little West. Dig. This is an album filled with pieces of music called 'The Cheapest Lunchbreak', 'Limping Ballerinas' and 'Happy Prog Nightmare'.
To describe this long-player, I'm-a-gonna have to get creative. Fact is, it sounds like the hauntings of a crazed Hammer Horror fan, his dreams shot in 8bit and recreated as a ghost level on Mario. There's a guitar in there, sure, but weird discordant Casio keyboards sit atop, drifting in and out of tune, making your thought turn to running around a town centre in a black cape, biting virgin's necks.
That's not to say this LP will drive you to senseless murder. There's some really sweet moments that make you feel like you're floating on a sea of cream. When this LP isn't whispering a seething instruction in your ear, it's flitting between zonked out electronics and the nicer bits of The Faust Tapes. To even suppose that this album has songs is a bit wayward.
The back of the sleeve tellsyer there's 11 tracks... but really, it feels like one long broadcast, one long soundtrack to a film that you don't feel quite brave enough to watch... featuring musicians from Tortoise, Broadcast and lesser known Twisted Nerve artistes.
It's fair to assume that this release will not dent the Top 40 hit parade... and nor should we assume that Jack Shirt will grace the cover of Q Magazine anytime soon... but that's a good thing. Basically, this LP is a fantastic collage of everything in the artist's head, all tumbling out and wired-up wrong. This is an album steeped in the experimentalism of Krautrock and really fucked-up folksike, the sorta thing that would get a release in the mid-70s, leaving everyone completely confused, later to become something of a cult classic.
If you've got the nuts, go buy 'Silent Beef'. You won't know what to make of it, but hopefully, like me, you'll be strangely enchanted by it and find yourself inventing the pictures for the terrifying, and sometimes beautiful, sonic visions. [mof]
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