Press & Reviews
Block
Timing is Everything
(Java/Capitol)
On his major label debut, Jamie Block mines the seemingly inexhaustible vein of urban malaise until it's pretty much spent. The New York singer-songwriter recorded the 13 tracks contained here in various studios, basements, living rooms and kitchens, and his piecemeal methodology lends the work a fractured, scattered sensibility that sounds like it's somehow just escaped from the ass-end of a black hole into the already-rotting 21st Century. Timing, as they say, is everything.
Beginning with "3rd Mall From the Sun," Block establishes his lounge lizard persona -- just one of several guises -- backed by cheesy plastic organ and a strip-joint snare. "The house is filled with lawyers," he groggily growls, "sleeping bags are filled, with refrigerated salesmen and hundred dollar bills . . . and everyone talks like Lindsey, and everyone talks like John, here on the third mall from the sun."
Life isn't any better in "I Call Her Vicious," which begins with a Nirvana-like guitar slash and an almost angry snarl before segueing into a track that sounds like it's from a badly-dubbed video of "Queen of Outer Space." "(She) took me, a nothing, it really isn't hard. I tell my friends I'm sleeping with a star," he forlornly croaks, his desperation matched only by his self loathing.
"I-95," on the other hand, is almost tender in its regret as Block leaves his lover to fend for herself, hitchhiking on the side of the highway. "When I came in here, saucer-eyed and yearning, I had no way of knowing, it was you who was turning. And I owe you something I won't give away, I owe you nothing I got nothing to say." Block's lover becomes a ghost in his rear-view mirror, one who'll never disappear.
Elsewhere Block insists "The Pink House Must Burn" to a catchy, clicking rhythm track and explains that the "happy combination" of "cigarettes, Prozac & Scotch" supposedly helped him get over his Southern Californian girlfriend, even though he gripes "I even wrote this song for you, a lot of good that'll do." But in his flat out funniest song, he tells the listener in his faux-Latin lounge lizard best, "I Used To Manage PM Dawn."
"I do not think a regular CD cover will work for you," he instructs some bent memory, "We should fly you guys to . . . Iceland! And do a picture on a . . . glacier! Just write it off, take it as a loss, it's no big deal. Actually it's on you. No loss. Here's some papers, a contract, it's all standard."
Jamie Block is the first artist to appear on Java, the label started by Glen Ballard, who produced Alanis Morissette. Ballard is obviously of a certain ear. Like Morissette, Block is far, far from the norm, which right there gives him a leg up, and there's enough creative energy and originality here to make his music worth returning to.
In a vacuous universe, Block's timing is dead-on.
--Tom Phalen