Los Angeles indie punks Jacob the Horse have a lot on their minds and some major targets in their sites on their new upcoming album At Least It’s Almost Over. The LP covers everything from the rise of modern fascism, dealing with anxiety, to rallying cries for anarchy and Satan.
For such a grand collection, the album requires an epic closing number. Thus, the final track of the album “Closer”, which we are excited to premiere today. The epic song is comprised of three parts: I. “AJJ Goes Electric (Shout Anarchy!!!)” / II.”The Black Hand, pt. 2: Fuck the Black Hand” / III. “It’s Over.”
The band discussed the origins and meaning of the track in more detail with us:
MARK DESROSIERS: “Closer” was originally written to be a live show closing song; it evolved into something of a capstone for the record, so we ended up really leaning into the theatricality and extending the song structure. I think we all had a song in mind when writing it, but I was thinking about a lot of The Decemberists songs, especially the three parts of “The Crane Wife” and their EP The Tain, both of which do such a good job bringing back consistent musical motifs but playing them wildly differently, in different keys or modes, with different lyrics to change how you hear the rest of the songs on the record a second time.
JOSH FLEURY: It sounds like someone clicking through the album on iTunes to listen to every preview.
AVIV RUBINSTIEN: I suppose the song could be called “Closure.” I had separately been working on a tune that I was calling “AJJ Goes Electric” because I started constructing the song before realizing it was ripped right from a couple different AJJ songs: The riff is directly ripped off of the song “Distance”, and originally the first lyrics were “Show me your fangs!” in the same cadence as their song “Darkest Heart.”
I’ve been a fan of AJJ for over a decade. A lot of their songs sound kind of similar [complimentary], so every time I mention the songs that inspired “Closer,” I have to go look up what they are. AJJ is also really good at mixing political anger, humor, meta moments, and a more elemental angst into their lyrics. All things I really admire and tried to strive for in the lyrics for “Closer.” We talk about death and dying, politics, we give a hearty ‘fuck you’ to our own songs, and then play snippets of them later in the track. Even the title “AJJ Goes Electric” is sort of an homage to their song “Zombie by the Cranberries by Andrew Jackson Jihad.” Ironically “Distance” is already one of their few electric songs, a feature that I figure they’d probably enjoy.
In the interest of clarity and brevity, we went with the title “Closer” pronounced like you’re telling someone to move close to you. Rather than “clozer” like the end of something. Even though the rest of the band gets it wrong all the time. We kept “AJJ Goes Electric” –and a couple other subtitles– for the names of the individual parts or movements of the song. It was too long for streaming services but the full name of the song is “Closer: I. AJJ Goes Electric II. The Black Hand Pt 2. Fuck the Black Hand III. It’s Over.”
So in trying to make the title more clear and brief, we did the opposite of both.
Got all that? Couldn’t be easier.
RICK CHAPMAN: The big finale, which we definitely stole from Weezer’s “Futurescope Trilogy – III. Return to Ithaka,” is just this big guitar heavy jam that builds and finally ends with a big ring-out. And instead of ending it after our own ring-out we keep going and play the opening part of the entire song again. It’s all so big and dumb and theatrical but it’s what makes rock songs so good in my opinion. I think Mark put it best when he said “it sounds like a better band covering a Jacob the Horse song.” We’ve just spent the last 35 minutes sharing our thoughts and opinions on the world and to me this song admits defeat. We’re tired. We’d love to write songs about other things but our politicians won’t let us. I miss when our songs were about drinking Yuengling in the sun but that was a different time.
AVIV RUBINSTIEN: Fun fact, we record live at The Atomic Garden in Oakland, and the song you hear on the record is the first take–one and done. We did a couple of guitar overdubs but basically tried to give you the thing as raw and rare as possible.
Be one of the first to hear the song above, and hear how it fits into the full album when it’s out this Friday, March 20th.
The Indy Review 