Jacks
The Jacks first album is a very special and original one. The band was part of the underground scene and had a more radical sound compared to other bands from the late 60s, even when compared to American garage standards this still is a rather subtle and highly creative thing. There’s a high intense almost dramatic raw emotionality in the vocals which brings the band, especially on the opener “Marianne” closer to garage psych, while mostly they are singing ballads with a psychedelic touch and fine harmonious arrangements. They had in fact their roots in 1966 as a folk trio, Nightingale, but evolved, as a 4 piece band to Jacks with a more psychedelic sound. This includes a certain slowness in the emotionality building up in the song, with subtle fuzz guitars and a few beautiful solos with it, some organ, and rather jazzy vibraphone contributions, good rhythms, and guitar with some use of reverb, or with like an earlier 60s freakbeat rhythm guitar with a surf touch, and a bass line which can sound a bit jazzy, or acoustic, at times as well. The (emotionally sung) drama builds up really beautifully in the songs, which alone makes this rather unique. Two later tracks on the album are more psychedelic bluesrock, and the last song, very originally is accompanied by church-organ like accompaniment. A really great album!
Tiliqua description : “This was the only disc with guitarist Mizuhashi in the groups’ ranks. He quit as soon as the recording session was over, ending almost immediately the classic line-up. Compared to their fellow Group Sound practitioners who squirted out lyrics mainly confined to boy meets girl and other sweet oozing problems, The Jacks generated dark, morbid and melancholic images, embodying the darker side of teenage angst and its decaying innocence, exposing their audiences on more than one single occasion to the creeping horrors looming out of their lyrical juxtapositions. The Jacks definitely didn’t have any intention to wear flowers in their hair in order to conquer Tokyo, the equivalent of San Francisco, like saliva driveller Scott Mc Kenzie put forward in his hippie theme song. The Jacks were the sole G.S. band whose total repertoire consisted out of their own material spiced up with Japanese lyrics; there where their contemporaries mainly focused on songs sung in exotic katakana English. Another characteristic that distinguished The Jacks from the other combos was their own unique sound, without making overt references to contemporary US or British psych, that steered away from duplicating foreign role models. Their acidic fuzz-laden whiplash set against a folk intoned backbone made them embody a conceptual demarcation with other G.S. sound-producing combos. The Jacks were a highly unique phenomenon. One of the cornerstones – if not THE cornerstone – of the Japanese psych pantheon. “
