Jamaican Queens, who played and sang their hearts out to an audience of scarcely half a dozen at TT’s on April 1st, are clearly well-accustomed to treating every moment as if it could be their last. Wormfood is bursting with sounds—hazy analog synths, folky acoustic guitar, skittering Southern hip-hop beats on top of live drums, Dirty Projectors-style harmonies, glitchy sound effects, a bassline borrowed from Portishead’s “Wandering Star,” a spot of theremin, and on and on—as if life were too short and uncertain to justify ever saying no to anything. It might sound cluttered on paper, but thanks to impressively clean production, even the densest parts are still crystal clear. The consistently rock-solid hooks certainly help, as does Spencer’s powerful voice, which is equally adept at loungey baritone and Avey Tare-ish yelps.
The latter comparison—with the placid Panda Bear’s maniacally yawping counterpart in Animal Collective—is especially illuminating. The emotional rawness of Wormfood brings to mind the more intense moments of Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam, songs like “For Reverend Green” and “Fireworks” that see Avey shrieking tearfully about the tragic brevity of life. But here’s the difference: even at his most heart-on-sleeve, Avey still sounds, at the end of the day, like a college sophomore waxing poetic between bong hits. Ryan Spencer’s existential ruminations, in contrast, sound like the thoughts popping into his head as he tears down a dark alley, struggling to come up with some fitting last words as a knife-wielding assailant closes in.
But the show! You’re supposed to be writing about the show! You always do this, man.
Okay, the show. It was good, quite good. It was especially fun to watch the band furiously multi task to recreate their crowded sound onstage: at one point the bassist was even tapping out his baselines on the fretboard with his left hand while hitting a drum pad with his right. It sounded a little muddy at times, but overall it was right and it worked.
A show without a crowd, though, is only half a show, and as I was walking out, the main thought in my mind was “wow, there was NO ONE there.” At the time it just seemed sort of depressing, but now, after listening to Wornfood enough to recognize it as easily one of the best, most desperately urgent albums of the year, I find a certain pathos in the total lack of crowd, the same pathos I find in the fact that Jamaican Queens self-released their album when any A&R man with ears and a heart would have signed them: these are guys who don’t want to waste a moment. You don’t wait around to find a label or book a well-publicized tour when any day could be your last–which, in Detroit, it could be. When death is at the door, nothing makes sense except to pull the trigger and go for it, and if six people show up to your show then fuck it, at least you tried.
The emotional tenor of Jamaican Queens’ music, both onstage and on record, is a tense and dizzying mixture of cheerfulness and desperation. Sometimes it sounds like the sort of ecstatic, overwhelming happiness that you get when you’ve eaten too many drugs, the happiness that seems always teetering on the edge of terror. Sometimes it’s the opposite: the ray of gratitude that might emerge from the terror when you are certain that you are literally about to die. But either way, joy and terror are always inseparable, and death is always a fact of life whose inexorability gives strange comfort. The lyrics to Wormfood‘s title track—
every time/you’re feeling lonely
every time/you’re feeling blue
every time/you feel down hearted
just remember/we’re all wormfood
—might seem, on paper, like depressive nihilism or, worse, just a snarky sick joke, and legions of hipsters will surely write it off as the latter when they discover this album. But that’s not right—it sounds too sincere and heartfelt to be either of those. The more I listen to it, the more convinced I am that these guys really, honest-to-God find spiritual comfort in the fact of their own, and everyone else’s, mortality. Few indie artists today confront such issues with anything like the courage and urgency of Jamaican Queens.
