Review Summary: You speak into this that machine there..
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Suffice to say, Jim Jarmusch always walked the iconoclast line with pained self-awareness. Like most Middle-America (nowhere) artists setting roots in New York City in the late70’s - the period when squalor broke, making beautiful filth fashionable - his music, much like most of his films tried to land right down the avant-garde middle, someplace where creamy intellectualism gnashed against daily mud. I came to Jarmusch from two sides, around the same stretch. First, from some random punk doc where he figured as a colour commentator, lending the indie-budgeted flick some viewership potential. In the doc, when asked the question what punk meant to him, Jarmusch went on a rave about anarchist movements, the pleasures of nihil, revolting against decency etc, etc. Asked the same question, Darryl Jennifer of Bad Brains said ‘We just wanted to do pills and f*ck girls, man,’ capturing pretty well everything Jarmusch was pontificating on in under two seconds. I walked away from that generally thinking ‘F*ck that guy.’ Then a few weeks later, I watched
Down by Law because I’d heard Tom Waits was in it. I walked away from that, thinking ‘This f*cker’s alright.’ It’s been more or less the same pattern with Jarmusch since, through movies, music,
Bored to Death cameos, interviews and the like. A little understated quality, a lot of masturbatory nonsense posing as understated quality (looking at you,
Limits of Control), stark vision and mannered idiocy all in equal measure.
SQÜRL’s, Jarmusch’s post-rock noise project’s first EP is a crest in this pattern, a thundering little highpoint. Terse, powerful and immense, it’s a 20-minute long shudder of megalith riffs, thick curtains of feedback, things dreamy and grotesque, in perpetual collision, like big water moving. From the vast noise that opens “Pink Dust,” through cheeky economical lyrics of “Dead Naked Hippies,” the savage tenderness of “Little Sister,” all the way to the last breaths of “Some Feedback for Jozef Van Wissem,” Jarmusch and Co. hit it on the head. SQÜRL manage to make something that sounds gigantic but seems modest, a small triumph, some colossal meaning elegantly disguised, an ambitious aim his film-work only occasionally strikes.
