Pointless. No, not the quiz show with the very tall man and a slightly shorter man. No, this is the word I am using to describe this debut from Caleb Landry Jones. This is a big statement, but you’re asking, how bad can it be? Well, to put it one way, it’s like walking into some apocalyptic hellscape that isn’t for once the outside world.
To give a bit of background, Caleb Landry Jones is best known for being an actor and has starred in the likes of Get Out, X- Men: First Class and Twin Peaks. This album feels huge, and it’s just over an hour, it was difficult for me to get to the end in all honestly. It says in the press release that there are elements of Sgt Pepper and Ziggy Stardust, but these get lost in the noise that this album revels in.
Opening track ‘Flag Day/Mother Stone’ starts with music that feels like it should be in some sort of Ealing comedy, then shifting into a myriad of different genres that don’t sit well all together in the same song. Follow up track ‘You’re So Wonderful’ continues Landry Jones’ second rate Bowie impression and includes a nice bit of screaming in the middle. Because that’s what we’re all after at the moment, a nice bit of screaming.
Things improve slightly with ‘I Dig Your Dog’, which has wacky lyrics to offset the psychedelic rock vibes emanating off the track, which gives off a Beatles-esque feel and odd lyrics such as “a cream so sour, and the family’s stacked, I’m hip to walking, I dig your dog”. This is quickly offset however by the song ‘Katya’, which has painful vocal shifts between gravelly voiced Caleb and normal voice Caleb.
‘All I Am In You/The Big Worm’ is also full of strange vocals along with weird instrumental shifts and mixtures, which by the way, sink a lot of the songs for me. There are a lot of musicians that can do this well and meld different styles to create something new and interesting. A lot of the instrumentation in these songs feels less like a patchwork, and more like Frankenstein’s Monster.
The only other song on here I have some praise for is titled ‘The Hodge-Podge Porridge Poke’ (stop laughing), which has a ramshackle charm to it. From here on in it is pretty much the same, weird psychedelic rock and art rock that doesn’t meld and slightly inaudible vocals, along with instrumentation that doesn’t click.
This whole album does feel like the artistic equivalent of sniffing a load of paint and sneezing it onto a canvas, less artistic masterpiece and more ‘ooh, that’s a bit of a bloody mess’.
I’ll cut to The Chase, to quote another quiz show.
This album has a couple of hits but mostly misses the mark, maybe I am missing something? This album does have a very niche feel.
I feel like ‘The Mother Stone’ would be better off left under a rock somewhere.
Caleb Landry Jones: The Mother Stone – Out Now (Sacred Bones)
