On the final line of his song “The Entertainment,” Max Tundra (aka
British solo artist Ben Jacobs) sings, “Load me in and let me
reign/’Cause I was born to entertain.” It’s a corny boast, and on
record—Jacobs singing in a rising, airy voice over muffled drums
and trembling synthesizers—it sounds almost like a desperate
plea, like the endearingly oddball musician simply isn’t capable of
doing anything else. (In the song’s preceding line, he dreams that his
“sequences will outsell Tool,” which is unfortunately not bloody
likely.)
But watching Jacobs perform—singing like a pitch-perfect Auto
Tune–free R&B crooner, fluidly improvising on keys and
guitar, jumping from one keyboard to another to melodica to
glockenspiel to thumb piano and back, or else jerking his body and
flinging his arms about spasmodically, always landing just on time over
his own confusingly off-kilter backing beats, doling out droll banter
between songs—it is entirely convincing that this man exists for
no other purpose than to entertain.
Jacobs grew up taking classical piano lessons but preferred playing
TV jingles (live, he warms up and sound-checks with bits of songs by
the likes of Van Halen and Foreigner, and one gets the impression that
he’s drawing from a vast mental catalog of melodies). As a teen, he got
a Commodore computer, which he began using to track and record music.
And in 1998, he released his first single on esteemed label Warp
Records, before releasing two albums on Domino, 2000’s Some Best
Friend You Turned Out to Be and 2002’s critically lauded
Mastered by Guy at the Exchange.
He spent six years working on his follow-up, 2008’s Parallax
Error Beheads You, an outstanding, confounding album that more than
justifies the wait. Parallax‘s songs hyper-
actively careen
from IDM to electro-funk to rock to pop R&B and back, yet they’re
expertly held together; once acclimated to its often-dizzying
production style and absurdist, referential lyrics, the album reveals
some fantastic, unexpected pop gems (one example: “Orphaned,” from
whose stuttering, microsample pulse emerges a perfect vocal pop
coda).
Still, though, six years? What took so long?
“It was a real pain in the ass to record the album, basically,” says
Jacobs, in an accent that makes even “pain in the ass” sound rather
erudite, by phone from a stop in Cleveland on his tour with Junior
Boys. “I just wanted to do the most layered, complex record I was
capable of, and I work in a very labor-
intensive way. And, I mean,
obviously, a lot of the six years was spent being too skint to sit in
the studio and make music all day, so I’d have to earn my keep and do a
succession of quite boring office jobs.”
Thus shooting down my notion that Jacobs led the kind of Bohemian
artist’s lifestyle depicted in the verses of “The Entertainment,”
leisurely shooting Maya Deren–inspired Super 8 films (“life with
a tripod in Manchester beckoned”).
Well, what then of the album’s finest song, the gauzy, giddy piece
of pop genius called “Which Song,” which finds Jacobs referencing such
disparate subcultural icons as Kevin Blechdom and Agnès B as he
frets about romantic anxieties and an uncertain future?
“Well, none of my songs are really about anything specific,” says
Jacobs. “But if you were to interpret the first verse of ‘Which Song,’
it’s not about Kevin Blechdom herself, but it’s about a girl who is a
little paranoid that a song I have written is about Kevin Blechdom. So
maybe it’s a song about a song about Kevin Blechdom.
“Because, in the past, I have been in situations with girls who
might have been jealous that I was also involved with other girls. A
lot of this album was written when I was kind of breaking up with
people and maybe starting up with other people, and it was quite a kind
of awkward time, personally.”
Still, as emotionally bare as Jacobs gets, he avoids the maudlin in
favor of jolting juxtaposition.
“I didn’t want to write depressing songs,” he says. “Too often when
a song deals with a depressing subject, the music itself is also
depressing—it might be in a minor key or sound like Jeff Buckley.
I wanted the music to be cheerful and upbeat, so there’s a kind of
tension.”
So, too, with both his recorded material and his inimitable live
show, Jacobs aims to disarm.
“Anyone who is any good will polarize people, because there’s
nothing worse than music that’s just all right,” he says. “I want to
make music that makes people think, ‘What the fuck?'”
In a just world, such beautifully baffling pop would outsell
Tool, and Jacobs would never have to work a day job again. Then maybe
he could make his next WTF opus before 2015. 