Andrew Jackson Jihad
Christmas Island

I discovered Andrew Jackson Jihad a few years ago, through Punknews.org and via the cover of Two-Headed Boy by Neutral Milk Hotel, their contribution to the single series called Under The Influence, initiated by Suburban Home Records, a great label that I suggest you check out. Like everyone else, I thought Andrew Jackson Jihad was a guy—the redhead tattooed on the cover—but I quickly did my research. I wasn't entirely wrong, though, in thinking Andrew Jackson Jihad were acoustic street punks, certainly cultured, but also irreverent and blasphemous, due to that cover, the guitar's aggressively expressionless sound, and especially for those out-of-context spontaneous joy choruses that still make me smile on one of the saddest songs one might have the chance to hear. That would have been enough: yet Sean Bonnette's neurotic singing asked me to delve deeper, inviting me into a world far more complex than what could be merely gleaned from the irreverent cover, revealing more solid affinities than those dictated by a heavy common influence. And indeed.

Through seasons of acoustic folk, featuring mandolin, double bass, banjo, kazoo, always with a punk attitude and relentless violence on the acoustic guitar, finally reaching straightforward, electric punk rock, always blessed by a caustic existentialist inspiration and lately even socialist —in a welfare sense—this year Andrew Jackson Jihad have come full circle and returned, at least musically, under the influence: because it's evident from the opening of Temple Grandin, with that fuzz of dark origin, that the island On Avery by Neutral Milk Hotel and the Christmas one by Andrew Jackson Jihad are found in the same archipelago, very close. It's impossible not to think of the pseudo-happy mood of Song Against Sex, musically cheerful and lyrically erotopathic and paranoid. The game of the title "Christmas Island" is indeed that of juxtaposing a signifier evocative of joy and pleasant sensations against an underlying somewhat depressing meaning; a game which an honest and little-known indie band from San Diego had already played: coincidence, citation, tribute, or theft, I could not say, besides, cult or heavily niche citation is a frequent exercise in Sean Bonnette's postmodern poetry. In short, the Andrew Jackson Jihad have arrived at a kind of tuneful and sunny indie piano rock with cello, double bass, and keyboard orchestrations, at times heavily touched by fuzz. Completely absent are the furious and clattering finger strumming of Bonnette, which had been an AJJ trademark, as well as the misanthropic anger that accompanied them, sublimated into a newfound expressive brilliance and unprecedented hermeticism, or replaced by more mature phony good sentiments, from the junkyard, in the name of a purportedly absent inspiration.

They are band-aid good sentiments, those in the opener, which first rip off a hip-hop trope from Lil Wayne Ray Charles to the bullshit, switch to Stevie Wonder, and sing blindness as the favored approach to bullshit, then from Aaron Cohen, switch to Hellen Keller and sing deaf-blindness to bullshit, and finally change to Temple Grandin, thus contributing to the trope, and sing affection for haters, because Temple Grandin had Asperger’s but was a genius and invented for herself and others the hugging machine, thus Temple Grandin to the bullshit. You understand that Bonnette has reason to sing so nervously not for style or pose, but because a younger brother of his was diagnosed with autism, and Temple Grandin was then the family hero, and you also understand how delicate and anti-rhetorical with his unique way of tackling complicated and even autobiographical themes he is. "Kokopelli Face Tattoo" is equally brilliant and in spirit when it says that hating a guy whose everything you hate is pointless, because hating him won't make him any less awful, but it's also the most fuzz-heavy and aggressive track on the album.

In the sense of having nothing to say, Sean Bonnette has invented a way to speak nonetheless: imagining alternative channels, specific, occasional minor, and parallel projects to Andrew Jackson Jihad. Thus before Christmas Island, the idea was to write a concept on the Apocalypse, then fortunately aborted, which however leaves a trace in the imaginative splatter of "Children Of God," in an epico-biblical tone between unforgettable images and fine arcadian-tasting similes such as "red eyes like a dog's asshole when you see it taking a shit"—which paraphrases the "red as the devil's dick" from Pineapple Express, and which Bonnette doesn't sing live out of shame—sky full of teeth, chants of cannibals and useless optimism from snack cakes like in Little Engine That Could up to the I think I can shouted at the end. A similar approach to writing may be a valid remedy for creative block, it seems. The apocalypse theme returns in "Do, Re and Me," which is an out-of-tune and twee little song about the ufological sect Heaven's Gate and the thirty-nine followers who committed suicide by poisoning themselves over some delusion about a comet nearing the sun in '97. It is through this song that I discovered the Man Is The Bastard, a (fucking) brutal band based in San Diego CA, the city of the Heaven's Gate cult, in fact: I don’t know who Thomas Lens is but the Man Is The Bastard hate him. As if to say, something's wrong in San Diego. The Christmas Island are from San Diego too, by the way.

"Coffin Dance" is a whispered, gloomy, and claustrophobic ballad supported by an acoustic arpeggio and a soft keyboard, inspired by a trash TV program and by Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, by Herzog but especially with Nicholas Cage: at a certain point, Sean Bonnette’s voice gets so thin it doesn’t sound like his anymore; in fact, it’s Jamie Stewart from Xiu Xiu. "Getting Naked, Playing With Guns" is impersonal storytelling on a historical backdrop—when Microsoft faltered in ‘94, while work was underway for Windows 95—but despite being the most inspired episode and perhaps the most pleasant on the album, it is, paradoxically, the least interesting. "I Wanna Rock Out In My Dreams," quite nice for the string arrangement, for the melody and the moderate epic band-like march at the end, ironically deals with moldy rockstar inclinations with boots and flying V, while Bonnette’s approach sees himself as a musician, writer, and artist more as a whiny liar; just as moderately epic and gracefully orchestrated is the final crescendo of Linda Ronstadt, which makes the best of AJJ’s current configuration [guitar, double bass (here with a bow, even), cello (ever-present, even in live tour arrangements this year), keyboard (which even becomes a harpsichord here), and drums (of the faithful Deacon Batchelor, who is also an excellent cook)] and starts from a concrete experience of lucid delirium in a museum to resolve fears and rather unexpressed anxieties: the music stands at center stage and the lyrics become more discreet—not overly so and hence without falling short—more than ever before Christmas Island. The filtered voice on the warm pianistic "Best Friend" clearly sings about pedophilia and the two-minute reassuring ballad is a freestyle of images on deicide and on the general suffering of all creation and the creator, including the possible, great, powerful, and wise supreme entity with all its Christ-like claims. "Angel Of Death" pushes Bonnette’s inspired lack of inspiration to the limit, which in saying absolutely nothing displays a vein of trash collection among swastikas drawn on walls, Total Gym, Salad Glove (by now an AJJ topos, holding the patent), Slap Chop and Forever Lazy, mocking conspiracy-Orwellian theories from dads-of-the-day, nuclear tests causing cancer to Bonnette's grandfather [a theme returning from the masterpiece "Big Bird," in the previous Knife Man (and Bonnette's grandfather really did die recently: see the anti-rhetoric and masterful use of the pathetic and autobiographical)], and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which would be titled Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans but Bonnette doesn't care and calls it Bad Liutenant 2 flaunting the Herzog-Ferrara controversy, and which at the end of the album we discover to be the greatest movie ever; or at least it could be according to a video store clerk who, being also the Angel of Death, might confess this belief to you before taking you away. So to speak.

Value judgments should be given cautiously, or better abstain: one can only acknowledge how the Andrew Jackson Jihad have remained substantially true to their peculiar aesthetic, their complex language, and the unique images they have created; also to their attitude, even while opening to commerciality—John Congleton's production is a clear indication—and undertaking new, ever-mature, complex, and ambitious musical challenges that are never pretentious. It shouldn't be up to me to tell you about Andrew Jackson Jihad and why they are so special, so apart from the many beautiful things that have come out in recent years, because I realize it's a question too personal, but this fact that on the internet it seems everyone's opinions matter and actually no one's opinion matters, allows me to tell you without too much trouble that Christmas Island—get ready to die—is the best album of the year. I mean, of those I've listened to. But have faith and listen for yourselves: some say that in the '90s no one gave a damn about Neutral Milk Hotel and then the next generation of twenty-somethings—mine—reinvented them as idols thanks to the internet; let’s not make the same mistake with Andrew Jackson Jihad, who exist now—even if I find it hard to believe—and fortunately.