Gig Review: Jackie-O Motherfucker

Jackie-O Motherfucker at Cargo. 30/11/06

Ah yes. One of the first alt rock bands I discovered when my musical path forked sharply left a few years ago, JOMF are a low key underground outfit. Their name suggests an angry heavy rock band, but in fact they make heavily textured droney free improvised music. The name was designed to ensure they remained under the counter and far away from the temptations and challenges of the mainstream.

After support from Inca Ore (layers of stoner vocals and flutes) and Alexander Ticker (layers of viola and guitar and vocals) failed to quite do it for me – all a bit flakey and lacking depth, things immediately look better when JOMF fill the room with assortments of bells and tambourines, adding guitars and held vocal notes, until my brain starts to wobble. As always, difficult to describe what is going on exactly, but this is a heavy dubby bad cousin of ambient music; one that is tugging at the coat ends of lunacy and dreaming of running off and joining a free jazz circus. Later tracks incorporate blistering polyrhythms and stabbing percussive effects.

1. Coolness of crowd: 6/10. More weird than cool. Seems to be lots of couples, comprising blokes who want to dig the music and lasses who want to be somewhere else very quickly. Very few of them make it through the JOMF set.

2. Bob quotient: 3/10. Poor.

3. Annoyment factor: 6/10. Yes there is some talking and anxious shuffling about, but somehow it doesn’t seem to bother me too much, such is the distracted and heavy nature of the music.

4. Sound quality: 8/10. Good.

5. Comfort: 7/10. A stand up gig, but as the room never gets that packed, I don’t feel locked into position.

6. Sexytime: 3/10. Just isn’t that.

7. Percussion / sound effect function: 7/10. Not much by way of weird instrumentation but all the acts rely on self-sampling and processing and layering to produce their aural soup – watery with the support, heavy and potatoey with JOMF.

Overall: 40/70, perhaps reflecting that it was all a bit weird and heavy, but in a good way.

Merchandise: None. JOMF reject the commodification of the musical environment.

Gruff Rhys?: He wasn’t there. Maybe he was too scared.

Visuals: Some low key projections.