Paul Jacobs: Let’s Make Some Noise

Tite: Easy

Label: Stolen Body 

All the way from Montreal Quebec, ex-one man band the now band-bedecked Paul Jacobs wrote, performed, recorded and mixed this album.

Anyone how has seen his eight albums, EPs and singles will also have seen his animations and art work.

The guy is a one-man dynamo of creative energy. 

His music, meanwhile is a vehicle to hide the man. It swamps him in noise and distortion. Whether this is a statement or a convenient vehicle of concealment is unsure but this, ‘press record and whack the levels up into the red’ approach to his relative art reduces the precision of his music and blurs out the detail. So what you get is Iggy Pop in the fog, garage rock down a phone, noise rock through a car speaker…

Mastering is largely irrelevant in terms of a sonic question. This album could have been half speed mastered by Mobile Fidelity and Jacobs would have ruined it. So mastering shmastering, the noise is here and present and it fulfils its purpose. It blots out life. It reduces the hurt. It stops you thinking. It dulls. It doesn’t excite. It’s the sort of music that prompts you to bang on the wall and demand that the volume be reduced until you realise that the stuff is coming from your room. The omnipresent nature of the lumpen rhythms fall over each other in a drunken melee to get to your ear.

So far so misshapen but, is it any good? No. Well, yes. And no. Bits are. Bits are great, then other bits are not. This Paul Jacobs album reminds me of emptying a heap of waste into a large bin. As the waste falls into the bin you see attractive objects falling past into the void. That’s what listening to this album is really like. 

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