Pitchfork

This week, as happens at least a couple times a year, a new Jandek album was dusted across the college radio and independent retail landscapes like a musical pesticide across a vast field of suck. But with Jandek fans prone to wild speculation, the name of this most recent Corwood Industries release is profoundly loaded: The End of It All.

As music writer Douglas Wolk discussed in the 2003 documentary Jandek on Corwood, albums throughout the Jandek catalog contain what some fans have translated as clues to the end of Corwood Industries' mysterious 26-year string of Jandek releases. Since 1978, Corwood has granted exactly one interview and generally offered no explanation for the music released under the moniker Jandek. Previously, much more subtle suggestions of finality have been amplified and circulated as fact-- notably the idea that a finite number of Jandek releases were recorded in a single session, and that the 19th release would be the last. Titles such as "The Electric End" and even "The Beginning" have been construed as coded letters of resignation.

Title aside, the album finds Jandek in roughly the same musical territory as on the June release Shadow of Leaves, an all bass and vocal collection that-- with the exception of its bright, apparently digital production-- is as dark and sour as Jandek's very earliest lonely acoustic guitar albums. On The End of It All, we find the same familiar voice wailing over a lone chorused guitar, the plastic-on-metal plunking of guitar strings bleeding in the vocal mic. The person singing seems troubled as usual. The thought of the Jandek story's end being indicated so directly and literally seems just unlikely enough to make it true, but naturally, nothing has been made official quite yet. Or possibly ever.