This Narrow Road

This Narrow Road is an album by Jandek (2001). Corwood Industries release #0768.

Track Listing:

1. Come Over Here
2. Frosted Field
3. I Knew About Them
4. I Need To Be
5. Just Like the Floor
6. Killer Cats in the Caribbean
7. Never Never Never
8. One Last Chance
9. Pieces of Place
10. Ten O'Clock Shadows
11. The Name I Had
12. Yes You Are

Album Cover Description There is a strange sepia tint to this photo. The walls look as though they are wood paneled. Jandek's hair is even more red than usual. His face looks bronzed. The shirt is brown... Oranges and browns dominate.

Picture is grainy, as if blown up quite a bit.

Reviews So are these new albums any good? Well, good and bad are strange terms to be using in relation to Jandek records. But listening to them, I can’t help being a little disappointed. Lyrically they seem weak -- sadly obsessive, with none of the traumatic imagery that made his earlier work so arresting. This Narrow Road’s 29-minute opener is perhaps the nadir: a stream-of-consciousness rant that sucks all the complexity out of the Jandek myth. The song chooses instead to play the scary-weirdo card: ‘Let them die, they all deserve, let them die/ It ain’t like killing/ It’s annihilation, extermination, elimination/ Eliminate the bad.’ Yet part of me wonders whether my complaints have anything to do with these new albums -- if, in fact, my incompatibility with Jandek is not his fault but my own. I’ve escaped the mess of suburban sprawl and retreated to the happy calm of the countryside. My head no longer cluttered, I don’t find Jandek’s current pathology illuminating: unmasked, it suddenly sounds single-minded and, well, pathetic. Maybe, with my newfound contentment, I’m no longer able to access the depths of feeling concealed within Jandek’s music. That, even more than his music, would be truly terrifying. -- Nick Phillips Mystery White Boy

Outside Links

• Seth Tisue's This Narrow Road review (http://tisue.net/jandek/discog#0768)