Self-taught Aussie's eccentric latest offering
There’s a fair bit riding on The Balky Mule, if you’ll excuse the pun. It’s Sam Jones’ first major release for eight years. It’s obviously self-recorded being, at times, endearingly chaotic, but occasionally unfocussed and messy. It’s full of jaunty acoustic numbers, with lo-fi vocals and catchy drums, although the sudden interruptions of blaring amplified noise is a mystery too far. Very natural and fresh percussion holds the songs together, while Jones’ strained vocals wander across the basic tracks with thoughtful and pondering lyrics above the strummed guitars and occasionally, other random echoes, beeps and buzzes. If it was a purely acoustic album, it would sound like poppy world-music, but with the electronic interludes sounds like a modern and less random version of Syd Barrett’s solo work.
’Jisaboke’ begins with a chaotic slam of percussion, and grating acoustic guitar before it settles into any sort of uniform tune behind the vocals, like many of the songs here. Voice battles with guitar battles with drums for prominence in the mix, without any of them winning, especially when the electronic background noise enters. Perhaps intended to bulk the sound up, it doesn’t seem to bear any relation to the rest of the music at all. All it does it interrupt a very sweet acoustic tune. It’s hit-and-miss; but when it works it sounds really original. The random bleeps and hisses are better suited to the beginnings of tracks like ‘A Moth?’ where they’re allowed to lead the song and everything else meanders along behind in its own time. Including, apparently, the electronic equivalent of a squeaky gate.
There’s not a great variation in the sound, so if it doesn’t strike you straight off, chances are getting any further in won’t impress you any more. But the images the sounds conjure are interesting, so if your idea of musical heaven is something to accompany lazy days lying outside daydreaming, this may be your thing. With some songs it’s easy to hear how they started as instrumentals, and gradually got lyrics, (‘Instead’ is a fantastic song that remained instrumental) but with others the words serve as an anchor to Jones’ more chaotic musical ramblings.
The home-recorded vibe gives the guitar sound an aged, classic ringing quality, at its purest. Collectively it sounds like a mellow mixture that comes across as a folky version of Pink Floyd’s Relics album. Jones clearly enjoys the role of the eccentric outsider, but for all the unusual beats and instruments scattered across "The Length Of The Rail", he doesn’t wander too far from traditional song structures, and ‘Range’ is as close as it gets to an actual pop song. ‘Chalk’s harmonica and percussion again bear no relation to the washed-out spoken vocals, and once again it comes too close to a Barrett parody, right down to the words “You see these drawings/they are my doing”. Self-consciously eccentric and dreamy, it’s a track that straddles the fence between genius and piss-taking, depending on your taste and point of view. It would have been groundbreaking in the sixties, perhaps. But it’s not bad, in fact, it’s intriguing, when compared to the varying degrees of pop, experimental, and folk on the album.