Graven Image

Graven Image is an album by Jandek (1994). Corwood Industries release #0761.

Track Listing:

1. Remain the Same
2. Helena
3. Ghost Town by the Sea
4. A Real Number
5. Be Going Down
6. Nothing You Lack
7. Chilocothe
8. For You and I
9. Janky
10. Lake Lagoon
11. Philip Was Mentioned
12. Closing
13. Fishing Blues
14. Going Away My Darling
15. Going Away

Album Cover Description Of a piece with the cover of the previous LP. Color photo, snapshot quality, taken standing in a driveway looking towards the street with a white house on the left and a telephone pole in the foreground. It seems reasonably certain that this photo was taken at the same time as the Glad to Get Away cover photo and from a vantage point only about twenty feet away (from this, I gather that we are supposed to consider the two albums as a pair). The two visible bushes (one right next to the house, one probably in the neighbors' yard) are somewhat unruly but the very small portion of Jandek's lawn that we can see seems to have been mowed relatively recently. A window on the side of the house is -- surprise! – open a few inches, but the reflection on the glass makes it impossible to tell whether or not the curtain is drawn. There's another white house across the street and a car that looks like it might date back to the early sixties sitting in the street in front of it. The house has an old fashioned stone foundation and the photo generally gives the impression of an ever so slightly run down neighborhood which hasn't changed much in the last 30 years or so. In fact the picture itself could be 30 years old, although the colors don't have the feel of an old photo, they're the kind of colors produced by a cheap present-day camera. The telephone pole in the foreground is a visual stand-in for Jandek himself: silent, anonymous, unmoving, gray-brown. -- Seth Tisue

Reviews “Jandek’s blues is one of an almost nightmarish intensity of horror and desperation...”

-- Josh Ronson -- Monk Mink Pink Punk #3

Outside Links

• Seth Tisue's Graven Image review (http://tisue.net/jandek/discog#0761)