Search - Jeroan van Aichen :: alexander's dark band

Goofy-Spooky Rawkola!

Tom Erhardt | Salem, Oregon United States | 05/11/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The darkest, starkest, funniest, most radical project by JVA (Portland, Oregon songwriter Jim Walker and a stellar list of musical friends). Jim plays most of the instruments and handles all the vocalizing on this self-produced CD. He calls it "low-fi" but the guy is no hack regardless of the instrument, voice, or special effect he chooses to dazzle us with. Songs move from slasher-flick vignettes, to lost love rants, to warped images of a drunken Mexican vacation, and a super-spooky free-association spoken poem set to industrial noise. Yeowww! This is not music to unwind by, but music to stretch your mind by. The title cut contains enough imagery and multiple-meaning phrases to keep you thinking for hours. You have to be open to a large dose of weirdness to enjoy this CD, but if you're up for it, it'll change how you hear and see the world, and give you a whole new appreciation for the misnomer "singer-songwriter.""