Jandek Follow Your Footsteps Original 1986 SEALED

$

34

 Original 1986 release on Corwood. This LP is SEALED! Perfect condition! Original Pressing.

Side One
1. HONEY
2. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SING
3. JAWS OF MURMUR
4. PREACHER
5. DIDN'T ASK WHY
6. LEAVE ALL YOU HAVE

SIDE TWO
1. I KNOW YOU WELL
2. DEARLY NEED SOME WORDS
3. STRAIGHT THIRTY SECONDS
4. BRING ON FATIMA
5. FOR TODAY
6. COLLECTION
7. WE'RE ALL THROUGH

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Jandek is a musician, presumably from Houston, Texas. Since 1978, he has self-released 61 albums of unusual, often emotionally dissolute folk and blues songs without ever granting a real interview or providing any biographical information.

Jandek plays a very strange and frequently atonal form of folk and blues music, often using an open and unconventional chord structure. Jandek’s music is unique, but his lyrics closely mirror the country blues and folk traditions of Eastern Texas.

Cover A very young (teenage?) Jandek stands wearing a somewhat disheveled white Oxford shirt and... a solid body electric guitar! An important cover, because it shows that Jandek has been playing music since a relatively early age. He appears to be in a basement with a very low ceiling, though there’s a window behind him, curtains halfway drawn, but it could be one of those basement window well windows. Jandek’s facial expression is blank, perhaps slightly startled. Review excerpts for FOLLOW YOUR FOOTSTEPS

• Byron Coley, Forced Exposure #12. “A song like ‘For Today’, w/ its sparsely-plunked notes and melancholically assertive vocals, could almost be an out-take from one of Michael Hurley’s classic albums on Raccoon... As the soul of individualism is being destroyed by the forces of evil, Jandek’s flame is an especially bright beacon in the dark.”
• Lawrence Talbot, Sound Choice #8 (1987) “The solo numbers with acoustic 12-string and intense vocals are hard to top, but the drum-guitar duo that starts the first side has its own kind of ambience that is also priceless. What we have here is a record but more than that, part of a career that comes to us almost rolled up in a time capsule. It is about only itself and makes everything else irrelevant.”
• Art Black, Away From the Pulsebeat #? (1988?). “The most song-oriented Jandek yet, with genuine rhythms & strums, percussion so minimal as to be near nonexistent, a rare second guitar or vocals. Sorta like Phil Spector’s worst nightmare.”
• uncredited, Aquarius Records catalog (website), 2002?. “While the last couple of recordings demonstrated a celebratory silliness... [this] exhibits greater tendencies towards introspection and musical isolation... what is most striking about this album is the genuine blues stucturalism of the guitar chords. Melody, even if it’s just two chords rhythmically strummed on an acoustic guitar, has become an important element in Jandek’s oeuvre. Of course, the songs utter the mythologically oblique imagery of preachers, time, reality, and nature — all typical of Jandek’s epistemological inquiries. It’s a cold world where Jandek lives.”
• Aaron Goldberg, web review for Perfect Sound Forever. “The opening chords of ‘Honey’ represent a kinder, gentler Jandek. The jangly, tuneful chords almost sounding like an English C86 indie band before the drums come in and drown out EVERYTHING... this album points to the beginning of Jandek perfecting a more ‘melodic’ and ‘cohesive’ type of space-blues-folk that can easily appeal to ‘indie’ or ‘pop’ ears.”