Jackie-O Motherfucker

It was closing in on a decade since Jackie-O Motherfucker last popped up on my freak radar, so this fairly cold reintroduction was equally nostalgic and awkward. My memory of the band was one dedicated to the lineage of Coltrane and Ayler digging for fire, though in JOMF's case, this was in rural campsites instead of opium dens. At this point, it sounds like Tom Greenwood's minstrels have grown so accustomed to their folk/country excoriations that they now comfortably inhabit its patchwork costume. Except for a couple of drum machine- and tone-bent ragas, the bulk of the album resembles the kind of mutated country fuckery that's been plied from the Meat Puppets on up through Castanets. Opener "In the Willows" has a checklist of lyrical tropes set to pretty, if drunk, acoustic plucking. Closer "Where We Go" lets loose the energy, but with a precision that comes closer to Black Mountain's standard Velvet Underground appropriation than any of their earlier work.