JINX LENNON comes from Dundalk, a small manufacturing town in Eire, just south of the border with Armagh. He is a deliriously angry poet. He's an inventive, soulful musician and an inspired social commentator.
The 20 tracks on this album are a blistering set of Steve Bell drawings, got up as MARK E. SMITH songs with VAN MORRISON Celtic Soul and Anticon rap poetry. His head-spinning virtuoso delivery scorches along from dense poetic rant to hypnotic mouth sounds and deep Nashville singing. He notices, names and shames our worst crimes, our hair loss and our grubby streets and then forgives them. He entertains, educates, maddens and inspires. He should be on the telly every night.
"Coming up next on the Ten O' Clock News, JINX LENNON excoriates out sinful consumerism, with an affectionate speedball meditation on the word styrofoam, yeh!"
Somehow I've made this sound a bit worthy.
Well forget that. JINX LENNON does real music, real poetry, real agit-prop rap and real performance. This isn’t some whimsical bleater with a beat box and a few cute lines. This is heavy duty up-there-with-the-best, smugness-shattering, literate assault rifle ammunition. And it sings like a bird too.
There are a couple of lovely songs where Paula Flynn's rich voice softens the mood. The links with Irish folk song and American country music bubble up to the musical surface and pour ancient balm into the wounds of contemporary despair. St. Brigid's Shrine is a mysterious song about the disruption of jealousy and the abstract love for things and people we have lost. I think it is. With the (deviant) children's chant "Fireplace-itis" It will make you cry and laugh just long enough to be ready for the megaphone street yelling of "S.U.F.Y. Hospitals" (stand up for your hospitals!) and the live ambience of "Accept Yr Hair Loss". This potential Comedy Club self-mockery routine suddenly turns a blade to the stone and glints menacingly with "I started to realise no one gave a shit about me and my hair. They had their own wells of misery."
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Maybe the virtuoso track is "The Flesh Taxi", a sleazy knowing electro pop drone that stamps on the cocktail glasses of a depraved Saturday night and crushes them with a boot into the late night gutter of globalising criminality and miserable sex.
To put it another way. Every time you think you have Lennon parcelled up as a category he shreds your misconceptions, turns out the contents of your pocket (and maybe stomach too) and slaps you on the back with the tattooed hand of human warmth.
A special mention, too, for the Pogues echo of "You Are No Scumbag". I would like this as my Christmas song for 2006 and onwards please. It's a lilting, hesitant waltz with a trumpet, extra voices and "big shiny balls" in every hall. "no need to feel that you a toerag. You-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou are no scumbag". With a street brawl thrown in.
Yeh.
www.jinxlennon.com
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