Jack O’ The Clock 2025
Portraits
Scoring their environment to verify the passage of a score years, Vermont veterans of sweet yearning stitch the past to the present.
One can’t enter the same river twice, yet surfacing once in a while to see what changed on the shore is quite possible, and that’s exactly what Damon Waitkus and Emily Packar did when they dusted off long-forgotten tracks from 2003 and found old tunes rather viable, even though most of the lyrics felt obsolete. Writing new words, of course, entailed recording fresh vocals, which also required a few instrumental overdubs, but whereas some of these songs’ protagonists got replaced with different faces, the pieces’ sonic facets remained faithful to the duo’s original intent. Their album still has a loose-concept aura, despite the slice-of-life – as the collective members call it – fashion of delivering the aural images, and still seems seamlessly tailored.
Yes, the enchanting “Isolation Booth” reveals the platter’s provenance by leaving a clutter of clatter in the number’s background, but such small details only enhance the cinematic feel of the overall flow. This series of pictures is brought to the fore with the warm twang ‘n’ shimmer of “Josephine’s Fresh Cuts” whose acoustic strum and organ passages conspire to defer the entrance of Damon’s rivetingly supple voice for more than two minutes only to bolster the bottom end with piano ripples and guitar riffs and suggest any expectations on the listener’s part must be thrown out the window right away. No wonder, then, that “I’m OK, You’re A Shithead” gets high on the incendiary blend of bossa nova and country yet resolving their dance, which Emily’s violin licks elevate even further, in a pure pop refrain and handclaps-helped cosmic hoedown, or that there’s a chamber flutter in “Lazy Tom Bog” and “No. 4 Mountain” which thrive on wordlessness, unlike the vaudevillian “Another Sunny Day / Star Of Monster” which unfolds polyphony alongside Celtic motifs.
There’s less of a surprise in the transparent “Year Of The Gypsy Moths” weaving flute into sublime baroque arabesques and “Nature Abhors A Vacuum” going for a spirited Appalachia and psychedelic uplift, but the tribal prog-rocking of dipartite “Puer” – whose second section forms the album’s finale – and the otherworldly folk of “Windigo Knocking” and “It’s Hard To Find Booze On Sunday” are simply staggering. Staggering towards “Portraits” and getting lost in its melodic gallery is a thrilling experience.
*****
