My Jerusalem
A Little Death

Tell me something that is important to me. I mean. Tell me something important, that has significant meaning here, now, in the present time. Tell me something about who we really are and the place where we live. I want you to tell me something true about the cities and the society we live in. Something that makes sense today and is happening right now around us. While we are talking. I want to hear something that truly means something to me and who I am and that somehow also represents my generation.

The big question is indeed. Where the hell are those who should have been the rock singer-songwriters of my generation? I was born in 1984 and when I started consciously listening to music, like most of my peers, we started listening to grunge music and bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden... This happened automatically, because after all, this was the stuff on TV, so... Basically when I started high school, in 1997 or 1998, we were listening to this stuff which already belonged to the past. Songwriters like Andrew Wood and Kurt Cobain, two icons of the previous generation, were already dead and buried and all that remained of that movement was nothing but damn business. The TV stations kept promoting that music and continued to do so for years. Let's be honest, the persona and charisma of Kurt Cobain were something truly special, unique, and although he never wanted to be a star, it worked tremendously well. Somehow it still does. Clearly, this doesn't answer my initial question. Where the hell were the singer-songwriters of our generation? Major record labels, immediately after Nirvana's boom, bought hundreds of small labels across the USA, wiped the slate clean, and tried to propose sounds and content that echoed that style. The final result was obviously a real 'generational leap' and the music proposed was mostly pure crap. Looking back, I am now fully convinced that at that moment we had no concrete idea of what was happening in the world and, even worse, we knew nothing about ourselves. I am not necessarily talking about big causes and what would be the monstrous 'macro-system'. No, we knew nothing about ourselves and what our everyday lives were. We didn't know how to be together, we couldn't confront ourselves, we didn't know what love was. Nobody taught us that, and nobody ever would. All they told us was to always look up to those who came before us, and we were listening to music of people who were actually dead for years or characters light-years away from our daily lives.

That's not all, of course. In 2000, Naomi Klein published 'No Logo'. It was an incredible success, I must have been fifteen or sixteen, I was truly struck by what she had written and I still appreciate the work she did back then, but even the contents of that work, which was indeed some sort of generational manifesto, referred to something that had happened before (she obviously also wrote with an eye on the future, let’s be clear, I consider her a very skilled author capable of brilliant criticism). When a year later in Genoa, Carlo Giuliani, God bless him, would die during a demonstration at the G8 in our country, practically everything Naomi Klein had written about the creation of an international social movement critiquing globalization and corporate capitalism at some point made no sense anymore. Everything was about to end. The flame, so to speak, burned for two or three more years because of Osama Bin Laden, because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq... Then everything stopped. I imagine that surely there are still international movements of this kind, yet, reading newspapers or watching TV, using traditional online informational channels, you won't find any information about it. Among other things, just to say, we are now fighting again in Iraq, is there anyone who can tell me something about it?

No, I don't want to offend anyone's sensibilities, I have no intention to, but the truth is our generation has been like simple jelly. I know many will disagree with me. After all, everyone claims the years of their youth and tends somehow to idealize them, to consider every content of them as the best possible. These become the dominant contents of their lives and everything somehow stops at that period. Everything that happens afterward, in a sense, doesn't make any sense. This naturally also applies to previous generations. In a sense, it's always the same shit and that's why we never find ourselves. It was the same shit for my generation too, which, after all, truly has nothing to claim for itself.

Meanwhile, the world has radically changed. Our society has rapidly changed due to the internet (especially) and the world of music has changed. A new generation of singer-songwriters has emerged, different from those before. Most of these obviously emerged from what would be the 'indie' subculture and movement. Many of them write pop songs that could perfectly fit clubs where they might as well serve aperitifs and play lounge music; others grow beards, wear large glasses, adopting a sage-like 'nerdy' look, and sing very boring songs even worse than those intellectual radical-chic episodes of the sixties. Often, by the way, referring to bucolic and pastoral settings. All stuff we couldn’t care less about.

Of course, not everything is garbage. Matt Elliott, Sufjan Stevens (the first two names that came to mind) are great singer-songwriters and ones I personally appreciate a lot. But they aren't rock songwriters. Tell me the name of a rock singer-songwriter who emerged at the end of the nineties or in the early part of the new millennium. Paradoxically, strange as it may seem, we can find a lot of 'important' songwriters in other genres than rock music.

For all these reasons, but also for its incredible beauty and grace, this album, 'A Little Death' (the term the French use to define orgasm, but which Jeff Klein wished to give the meaning of an intermediate phase, as if to imply the end constitutes in this case the achievement of a goal and therefore a necessary condition for a new beginning), is something I want to define as a sort of little miracle as a stupid play of words. This is because, damn, finally, here is an album with real content. That truly makes sense. Released on Washington Squared, the new album from the Austin-based band My Jerusalem, has exactly the characteristics I was referring to. Apart from the fact that without a doubt we are facing a damn rock and roll music album and a songwriter, Jeff Klein from Newburg, New York, an interesting personality who, far from being in any way eccentric, is completely immersed in the context of the society we live in today and though he doesn’t define himself as a politicized songwriter (he isn’t, not entirely, and this would be a limiting definition anyway), writes songs about what it means to live in these strange and damn dark times.

His apprenticeship period was long before he finally found his path and started this project in 2010. Having moved to Austin in 1999, he began recording some songs as a solo artist before starting to collaborate with artists like Ani Di Franco, Ed Harcourt, and especially Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan. He played keyboards in the Twilight Singers and became a touring member of the Gutter Twins (along with other future members of My Jerusalem, Jon Merz, Kyle Robarge, and Grent Van Amburgh). Experiences that were surely significant and influential in forming Jeff Klein as a musician and songwriter and which constituted an enormous asset for My Jerusalem and the foundations of the entire project, along with his vocal talents, which have been notably appreciated and variously compared to the likes of Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Mark Lanegan and though I do not recognize a particular affinity in this regard with any of the named singers. At the same time, it is undeniable that he is a good singer and particularly an excellent songwriter, deserving comparison with his two mentors, Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan, but also with Nick Cave for certain blues and dark sounds, although lacking the typical Bad Seeds' rage.

'A Little Death' opens with 'Young Leather', an electric blues with thrilling atmospheres paying tribute to the 'vibe' sound traditions of the southern United States of America and to piano-rock, with the imposing use of trumpets exploding into rock and roll sounds in a triumph of brass instruments as if listening to a large orchestra dominated by Klein's vocals ('Dominoes').

'Rabbit Rabbit', the song that preceded the album, takes up the style of more recent bands like Interpol due to the wave arrangements and guitar sounds and the use of synths. Jeff Klein himself took the time to explain the song's content, which talks about what we could define as 'rituals' and superstition. Things from his childhood when he attributed particular mystical power to the high spoken repetition of the word 'Rabbit' upon waking on the first day of every month. Exciting atmospheres and electric guitars flash like blistering flames ('Jive For Protection') as we walk with our heads down, looking at our shoes, counting every step, putting one foot behind the other as if walking on an imaginary tightrope while gambling instead of clinging to what can be concrete safeties, because our times are always uncertain and they can never be different from what they are now, even in the future and in the future of this gigantic and undefined suburban reality.

Permeated by dark atmospheres, the album proceeds with rock ballads like 'It's Torture!', where the singing indeed echoes Nick Cave's interpretative style and the guitars play in that slow, smooth, tremendously sexy manner of Greg Dulli's Afghan Whigs. But 'A Little Death', as mentioned, is an album that talks mostly about life in big cities. Jeff Klein is to Austin what Greg Dulli ('Eyes Like A Diamond') was to Cincinnati, Ohio, or Paul Westerberg ('Flashes', 'Young and Worthless') was to Minneapolis, Minnesota. The listening throws us into noir settings and classic hard-boiled novels. We are solitary heroes in a big city like Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, or Mike Hammer. What we do is literally plunge into the city's bowels, which grip us as if they hold us in the palm of their hands. 'No One Gonna Give You Love', a desperate love rock ballad with an unmistakable blues flavor; songs that have the scent and indistinct traits of cigarette smoke ('Done and Dusted') that end dramatically with the vibrato and distortion of guitars; blues pianos played in semi-desert clubs in the dead of night, when it's cold outside and there's no one else around and you're completely alone and you know that sound is the only thing you can hold onto with all your strength to feel alive and not fall and get lost definitively in the city's meanders ('Chrysalis').

Jeff Klein has defined the album as partly 'modern' and partly tied to tradition, but after all, this is inevitable if we talk about rock and roll music and draw on the long blues tradition, considering this as the music that heals the soul and makes love burn strongly in our hearts, music made by and for solitary souls and the marginalized to feel less alone. Among the album referrals, Jeff Klein wanted to mention Walter Hill's 1979 film, 'The Warriors' (based on Soul Yurick's 1965 novel of the same name), which is set entirely in the big city at night and populated by people and solitary souls wandering randomly through the streets trying to give meaning to their lives or simply to survive before being swallowed by the great all. This is a special album loaded with meanings that are important not only for those who feel alone (but after all, everyone, maybe not always, but we all feel alone) and for those who have the conviction, right or wrong, that no one will ever heal their lonely souls and there will be no 'salvation' mentioned in the sacred scriptures. Obviously, in this sense, the album offers no answers, how could it, if only we can save ourselves from ourselves and maybe find a reason to do so in the music and the words ('The City Is A Cannibal, I Think It Will Swallow Me...') that are slowly driven by the wind down the streets outside beyond the glass of our windows? All we have to do is step outside.