Senseless is a world in which some people can’t buy an ounce of talent to save their lives while others have enough to cover for three or four people. Jim O’Rourke is firmly among the latter. Since his earliest recordings with Brise-Glace, the Red Krayola and Gastr del Sol, it’s been clear that this Chicagoan-just-turned-New Yorker hijacked an entire generation of MTV acts and made off with their collective artistic genius.
To sum up what makes Jim O’Rourke special, consider the parts that compose the whole. He is a stellar guitarist (both electric and acoustic), an accomplished arranger, an electronic pioneer, a tape manipulator, an incisive lyricist, a decent singer, an album-changing collaborator, a top-shelf producer and – as last year’s Insignificance shows – a pretty awesome straight-up rocker to boot.
Since breaking onto the scene in the early 1990s, Jim O’Rourke’s name has been associated with “post-rock,” a pop genre driven as much by tape loops, electronic cross-rhythms and oblique lyrics as it is by guitars, odd time signatures and snappy arrangements. And no one combines all the elements as well as O’Rourke.
O’Rourke’s earliest successes in deconstructing the pop/rock format came in his work with Louisville’s Gastr del Sol, an avant-garde rock band whose founding member, David Grubbs, had a background in punk. Always experimenting, Grubbs and O’Rourke worked together for the better part of five years, peaking on their swan song, Camoufleur, which mixed incredible guitars, incredible guitars played backward, tape loops and some explosive Dixieland trumpets (from fellow post-rockers Rob Mazurek, Jeb Bishop and Ken Vandermark) into seven fantastic songs.
During this period, O’Rourke also moonlighted in the Red Krayola, whose leader, Mayo Thompson, first began a quest to dismantle the popular song form in 1966. More “prog-rock” than “post-rock,” the Red Krayola experimented first and wrote hooks later. Like everyone else in the band, O’Rourke was both Thompson’s collaborator and his student. Thompson was using primitive tape loops and synthetic sounds from his very first album, and these continued to contribute to the Red Krayola sound at the time O’Rourke joined in the mid-nineties.
Appropriately, O’Rourke’s embrace of electronics in his solo work truly came into its own around his Red Krayola period.
His first significant success with electronic work came on 1995’s Terminal Pharmacy. The album kept a synthetically centered mood throughout, especially on the 41-minute opening track that exploited O’Rourke’s propensity for recording traditional acoustic instruments and then manipulating them with tape techniques and electronics until they sounded quite different from the original recording – quite different from anything at all out there, to be precise..
Later releases like Bad Timing (1997) and Eureka (1999) led O’Rourke back to more traditional songwriting and showed off his skills as an arranger and guitarist. During this time, Gastr del Sol was on its last legs. Camoufleur came out in 1998 and O’Rourke and Grubbs have not recorded together since.
As Gastr del Sol and also the Red Krayola phased themselves out of O’Rourke’s life, his new compositions (and he is prolific) went exclusively toward his solo work. In 2000, he released an EP, Halfway to a Threeway, which stripped down Eureka’s gaudy arrangements, brandished some classic lyrics (an often overlooked aspect of post-rock in general) and ranks as a favorite among the Jim O’Rourke faithful.
O’Rourke also spent more time producing, having since worked with Stereolab, High Llamas, Sonic Youth and countless lesser-knowns. He also produced the often heard but still unreleased Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, now due out April 23.
All this leads to Jim O’Rourke’s current solo work. In the course of a month, from November to December of last year, he released two albums from the extreme poles of rock music. The first one, Insignificance, sounds like Led Zeppelin with a professional arranger and a sense of humor. Simply put, it rocks harder than anything O’Rourke has previously put to record. Tracks like “Get A Room” and “All Downhill From Here” feature wry, self-deprecating lyrics but also seem to prove a point that O’Rourke can rock out when he feels like it. The grinding guitars on “Memory Lane” sound miles away from the paisley pop of Eureka or the brow-furrowing bulk of Gastr del Sol’s work.
Insignificance also sounds miles away from I’m Happy and I’m Singing and A 1,2,3,4, which was released a month later but sounds like it comes from a future life. Of course, O’Rourke does not sing, and I’m Happy is nearly all electronic; it revisits the droning puzzles of Terminal Pharmacy but under the guidance of six years of wisdom and experience in other forms of music. If O’Rourke uses any acoustic instruments, he’s drowned them in a cauldron of loops, electronic bleeps and phases. While clocking in at more than forty minutes, I’m Happy features just three tracks, which descend in urgency from the wild, curious opener to the almost droning closing cut, which accounts for nearly half the album. It’s not as consistent as Insignificance, though its first song features the best moments of either album.
What’s truly remarkable is that these two albums could come from the same man. You might have a hard time arguing that O’Rourke is either the best electronic or straight-up rock artist performing music today, in part for his lack of mainstream exposure but also because there are a lot of great artists still out there in both genres. But nobody else approaches music quite the way Jim O’Rourke does, and certainly no one has been so consistently successful in so many different genres. But should someone else come along who can produce, play guitar, arrange and manipulate a computer with equal grace and brilliance, may he/she have only the greatest successes. May he or she also release two albums in a month. nyou
