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| Track list: 1. Inaudible Melodies 2. Middle Man 3. Posters 4. Sexy Plexi 5. Flake 6. Bubble Toes 7. Fortunate Fool 8. The News 9. Drink the Water 10. Mudfootball (For Moe Lerner) 11. F-Stop Blues 12. Losing Hope 13. It s All Understood 14. Flake (live) 15. Inaudible Melodies (live) Running time: 53 minutes Released: 2001 |
OK so. This takes me back. Not quite to 2001 as I came to it later than that. In 2002-2003 I found myself in an inadvisable situation which, amongst other things, exposed me to Jack Johnson. For whatever reason I picked up this, and On and On, so my first impressions must have been good. However since then he's pretty much been an auto-skip. Forcing myself to listen (and because I have the British version, I get two bonus live renditions; woo!) is a good way to confront the biases I may have built up.
I have been quiet here of late, and this post is overdue. Busy as the weeks are, a long weekend would normally have offered me the opportunity to make up for no evening posts, but a combination of a 6 1/2 hours of driving (plus knock on tiredness) and my antipathy for this particular listen put paid to that. Still, here I am to buck it up. There is a lazy feel to the opening guitar line, an almost smug laziness in fact. It's as if it thinks it is so cool it doesn't have to try, so doesn't. I can't tell if I hate it or secretly admire it. So empty and yet...
It feels a little like a busker on the street, tapping into something done by someone else, not quite delivering but giving you enough to recognise the quality of the source material. Here I find myself bouncing off Johnson's voice rather hard, but finding an affinity for the slow sway of the tempo. So, a nice clean and clear opening then.
Middle Man is immediately less interesting. More standard in its construction, i.e. a little busier, and higher of pace, it doesn't have the easy rhythm of Inaudible Melodies, the magical timing and that sense of self importance. That quality is repugnant, but it often exists because there is something else special that leads one to believe in it. Posters tries to recapture it, but ends up feeling very, very dull. This does try to rebottle the playing from the first tune, but falls into a structure that has less room for it. I am still bouncing off the voice, too, which has a more important role in this track, rendering the guitar to a sideshow. I can see why people liked this a lot, but each track seems to erode my patience with it further. It is like an amalgam of several different artists, stealing little tricks from several different places - Sexy Plexi brings to mind 4 or 5 other musicians or groups in turn. It feels ripped off, or like a homage to something, rather than its own thing.
Short week this week - not only was there a bank holiday on Monday, I'm off on Friday too, going to the UK Games Expo. Then hosting friends on Saturday. I'll need to flop on Sunday, for sure. It's also been an odd week - finding my TV aerial broke piled another thing to do on top of booking a dental appointment and the thing I find myself forgetting every bloody day... to get on to someone about fixing my boundary fencing. I am utterly incapable of getting that sorted out; at a time when calling would be possible I put it down as something I must do, then promptly forget until a time like now - an evening when calling a tradesman isn't on. Argh!
Ugh. Bubble Toes. Stupid goddamn nonsense. The insouciance that is the predominant theme conveyed by Johnson's style has been growing more irritating with every track since the first, but when met with wordless choruses it reaches a zenith of annoyance. This song is just awful, and yet a centrepiece. Thankfully all of these tracks are quick, past and gone in short order - not because they are actually that short (Bubble Toes is just shy 4 minutes), but because they are easily tuned out.
The next track actually recaptures a bit of the style and swagger that put me on the fence about Inaudible Melodies. Whilst this, like the tracks before, is based on simple looping guitar hooks, it has the right spacing. The timing of the switch from one riff to another, the overall tempo. An easy sway. It makes things accessible but also generates that feeling of effortlessness. I guess it is impossible to not connect the form of his music with Johnson's surfer background. It has that stoner / dropout ease to it, the low key tone that you imagine just sitting on a beach after dark around a fire pit with friends might bring. It permeates, overloads and beats down any attempt to really get invested. It's all too laid back. I have to be fair and call out what I like, too; the edge to the sound on Drink the Water - provided by the bass part - makes this track more interesting, at least for the first 30 seconds or so. After that point you have basically heard the whole thing. I am far from done with this listen yet, but I feel the same for the album - a taster is more than enough to know what the whole thing is like.
I am getting no enjoyment. A sense of distance instead. I am inured now to the bits I don't like, and there is so little left once they are removed. It is just... bland. I think that very blandness was possibly the root of his success. Not offending the maximum number of people, and getting picked up through familiarity. What is distinctive as a one-off is utterly samey in quantity - that sense of style that makes Jack Johnson tunes very recognisable becomes a formula stuck to so rigidly that if you've heard one you've heard them all. Sure, there's some variation in pace between tunes, but the compositions barely shift. Of course, as I say that we get a track that has a different base - much more weight on the percussion come Losing Hope; the elements here are all the same though, it's just the weightings that changed slightly. It was a surprise at start, but it falls into the same repetitive patterns as prior tracks pretty fast.
There is no question that Johnson has something; his style is a real asset, if you like that sort of thing. I find myself not liking it, and cursing my younger self for buying into it based on association with what brought him to my consciousness in the first place. Whilst I freely admit I am a lazy so-and-so, the ultra-laid back "aren't I cool" sense I get from JJ's vocals and the predominant tempo of his works set my teeth on edge a bit. I was never "cool"; I never will be. I'm happy in my nerdiness, which makes a self-satisfied sounding dude like Johnson anathema to me. I am into the two live tracks now; the screaming of the crowd is so out of place with the over-relaxed nature of the tunes. They're so sedate that whilst I can see (and vehemently disagree with) the reasons people like this stuff, I can't for the life of me how anyone gets into it enough to vocalise, be it scream or cheer, in response to it. Its very nature is low key, not hype.
This is a clear out. The second bonus track is a version of Inaudible Melodies and, hearing it again after being exposed to almost an hour of Johnson with nothing else in between, it has lost its swagger and with it any appeal. The crowd of screaming fans really doesn't help there, but mostly its my fatigue. Yes - this could be a case of confirmation bias, but frankly I don't care. Good riddance surfer-dude.
I have been quiet here of late, and this post is overdue. Busy as the weeks are, a long weekend would normally have offered me the opportunity to make up for no evening posts, but a combination of a 6 1/2 hours of driving (plus knock on tiredness) and my antipathy for this particular listen put paid to that. Still, here I am to buck it up. There is a lazy feel to the opening guitar line, an almost smug laziness in fact. It's as if it thinks it is so cool it doesn't have to try, so doesn't. I can't tell if I hate it or secretly admire it. So empty and yet...
It feels a little like a busker on the street, tapping into something done by someone else, not quite delivering but giving you enough to recognise the quality of the source material. Here I find myself bouncing off Johnson's voice rather hard, but finding an affinity for the slow sway of the tempo. So, a nice clean and clear opening then.
Middle Man is immediately less interesting. More standard in its construction, i.e. a little busier, and higher of pace, it doesn't have the easy rhythm of Inaudible Melodies, the magical timing and that sense of self importance. That quality is repugnant, but it often exists because there is something else special that leads one to believe in it. Posters tries to recapture it, but ends up feeling very, very dull. This does try to rebottle the playing from the first tune, but falls into a structure that has less room for it. I am still bouncing off the voice, too, which has a more important role in this track, rendering the guitar to a sideshow. I can see why people liked this a lot, but each track seems to erode my patience with it further. It is like an amalgam of several different artists, stealing little tricks from several different places - Sexy Plexi brings to mind 4 or 5 other musicians or groups in turn. It feels ripped off, or like a homage to something, rather than its own thing.
Short week this week - not only was there a bank holiday on Monday, I'm off on Friday too, going to the UK Games Expo. Then hosting friends on Saturday. I'll need to flop on Sunday, for sure. It's also been an odd week - finding my TV aerial broke piled another thing to do on top of booking a dental appointment and the thing I find myself forgetting every bloody day... to get on to someone about fixing my boundary fencing. I am utterly incapable of getting that sorted out; at a time when calling would be possible I put it down as something I must do, then promptly forget until a time like now - an evening when calling a tradesman isn't on. Argh!
Ugh. Bubble Toes. Stupid goddamn nonsense. The insouciance that is the predominant theme conveyed by Johnson's style has been growing more irritating with every track since the first, but when met with wordless choruses it reaches a zenith of annoyance. This song is just awful, and yet a centrepiece. Thankfully all of these tracks are quick, past and gone in short order - not because they are actually that short (Bubble Toes is just shy 4 minutes), but because they are easily tuned out.
The next track actually recaptures a bit of the style and swagger that put me on the fence about Inaudible Melodies. Whilst this, like the tracks before, is based on simple looping guitar hooks, it has the right spacing. The timing of the switch from one riff to another, the overall tempo. An easy sway. It makes things accessible but also generates that feeling of effortlessness. I guess it is impossible to not connect the form of his music with Johnson's surfer background. It has that stoner / dropout ease to it, the low key tone that you imagine just sitting on a beach after dark around a fire pit with friends might bring. It permeates, overloads and beats down any attempt to really get invested. It's all too laid back. I have to be fair and call out what I like, too; the edge to the sound on Drink the Water - provided by the bass part - makes this track more interesting, at least for the first 30 seconds or so. After that point you have basically heard the whole thing. I am far from done with this listen yet, but I feel the same for the album - a taster is more than enough to know what the whole thing is like.
I am getting no enjoyment. A sense of distance instead. I am inured now to the bits I don't like, and there is so little left once they are removed. It is just... bland. I think that very blandness was possibly the root of his success. Not offending the maximum number of people, and getting picked up through familiarity. What is distinctive as a one-off is utterly samey in quantity - that sense of style that makes Jack Johnson tunes very recognisable becomes a formula stuck to so rigidly that if you've heard one you've heard them all. Sure, there's some variation in pace between tunes, but the compositions barely shift. Of course, as I say that we get a track that has a different base - much more weight on the percussion come Losing Hope; the elements here are all the same though, it's just the weightings that changed slightly. It was a surprise at start, but it falls into the same repetitive patterns as prior tracks pretty fast.
There is no question that Johnson has something; his style is a real asset, if you like that sort of thing. I find myself not liking it, and cursing my younger self for buying into it based on association with what brought him to my consciousness in the first place. Whilst I freely admit I am a lazy so-and-so, the ultra-laid back "aren't I cool" sense I get from JJ's vocals and the predominant tempo of his works set my teeth on edge a bit. I was never "cool"; I never will be. I'm happy in my nerdiness, which makes a self-satisfied sounding dude like Johnson anathema to me. I am into the two live tracks now; the screaming of the crowd is so out of place with the over-relaxed nature of the tunes. They're so sedate that whilst I can see (and vehemently disagree with) the reasons people like this stuff, I can't for the life of me how anyone gets into it enough to vocalise, be it scream or cheer, in response to it. Its very nature is low key, not hype.
This is a clear out. The second bonus track is a version of Inaudible Melodies and, hearing it again after being exposed to almost an hour of Johnson with nothing else in between, it has lost its swagger and with it any appeal. The crowd of screaming fans really doesn't help there, but mostly its my fatigue. Yes - this could be a case of confirmation bias, but frankly I don't care. Good riddance surfer-dude.
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