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Inca Ore – Joy

There’s a little bit of a buzz around internet chat boards (you know, the ones that have been listening to an album six months before a mention surfaces elsewhere) about Inca Ore (aka Californian Eva Saelens of the group Jackie O-Motherfucker). After a dozen or so self-released CD-Rs, Birthday of Bless You has been released on Not Not Fun and it may just be one of the better ‘weird’ releases of the year. More an atmosphere than an album, its songs (just piano and vocals) have been cloaked in phasing to the point of becoming a nightmarish soundtrack that wafts eerily by. Not for everyone, in other words. But if you like ambient “avant folk,” keep an eye out for it.

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Photo by tomaz86

The cycle of the mantra-like “Nice One” start things off on a tranquil note, its calm-inducing waves making it easy to picture yourself lying on a beach with eyes shut as the sun rises. After it drifts into an extended run of static, droning interplay, “Rockaway” resumes matters with another slice of daydreaming acoustics, delivering some of my favourite lines from any album this year:

“I’m goin’ up to Heaven, gonna talk to the good Lord above / If I can’t get me no angel, send me back the one I love.
Tombstone is my pillow, graveyard’s gonna be my bed /
Blue sky is my blanket, pale moon’s gonna be my spread.”

This is as straightforward and simple as the quartet get, and arguably, their most effective…and that momentum, that warm, absorbing streak they seem to get rolling, is continued with the blissfully sedative “Hey Mr. Sky.” Combined, the crux of the opening three songs provide a brilliant, mouth watering invitation to float away on a slow burning album.

However, before its final notes have even completely faded out, an entirely different direction is undertaken, with the 11 minute long enigma “Spirits” proceeding to dismantle that climax by smashing it into smithereens.

Inspired and titled after an American songbook of traditional hymns and anthems from 1844, it’s doubtless that there is a deconstructive statement to be found here, but in music terms alone, Jackie-O Motherfucker leave the listener with quite a conundrum. A fragmented album stemming from two different entities, the potency it promises early on spills open and washes over whatever remains like the sour, rusty cello that picks at the bottom of “Loud and Mighty.” In the end, it will all boil down to how open you are to the lengthy and perhaps testing digestion process, but if you’re familiar with their oeuvre, you’ll know Jackie-O Motherfucker are not here to fit neatly into any system of comprehension.

Artist / Group:
Jackie-O Motherfucker
Album:
Flags of the Sacred Harp
Label:
Atp
Released:
5th December 2005