Ducks Battle Satan

Jackie-O Motherfucker are a band from Portland, Oregon  based around two core members, Tom Greenwood and Jef Brown. They started their career as a much more experimental band before embracing pastoral themes on 2006’s Ballads of the Sacred Harp. Jackie-O Motherfucker have made a previous appearance at Ducks Battle Satan and that record is along the same lines as this. Blood of Life was a live record which covered a couple of the tracks from Ballads.  There is such a serene quality to the music of JOMF on this record and if you like your folky improvisers to have a bit of  a tune then this is worth while tracking down. I like this better than Blood of Life for two reasons. Firstly because it’s less bleak than Blood of Life and secondly because they hit a groove right out of the  Religious Knives playbook on some of the tracks here. It also has some nice noise elements (around the seven minute mark on Nice One for instance) which lift this beyond hippy dippy psych- folk. They also show a more experimental side – the 16 minute long Spirits would not be out of place on one of the stranger Nurse With Wound outings. I’ve always found a lot of improvised, experimental, folk records a bit of a slog. I’ve dabbled a fair bit but very few have made their way onto DBS. That said, when a band gets it right like Jackie-O Motherfucker do on Ballads of the Sacred Harp, this sort of sound is well worth tracking down.

This entry was posted on February 28, 2010 at 11:04 am and is filed under Free Folk, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Music with tags Jackie-O Motherfucker, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.