| White Box Requiem | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Studio album by | ||||
| Released | 1996 | |||
| Genre | Outsider, folk | |||
| Length | 45:39 | |||
| Label | Corwood Industries | |||
| Producer | Corwood Industries | |||
| Jandek chronology | ||||
| ||||
| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   [1] |
White Box Requiem is the 25th album by Jandek, and his only for the year 1996. Released as Corwood Industries #0763, it is essentially a "concept album" about death, loss, and a man who opens a mysterious white "Pandora's box", which some have speculated is a coffin.[2] There are 14 songs with acoustic guitar, half of them with vocals.[1][2] The instrumental pieces are sparse and experiment with echo, with "restless" passages that music critic Andre Salles has described as "consistently inventive atonal plonking that never sits still".[2]
After not releasing any music in 1995, Jandek returned with White Box Requiem the following year.[2] According to a rare interview with Jandek that appeared in The Wire, the album had originally been planned as a song-by-song response to Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair.[3]
Track listing
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "The Glade" | 1:23 |
| 2. | "White Box" | 3:48 |
| 3. | "Second Thoughts" | 1:40 |
| 4. | "Concrete Steps" | 3:43 |
| 5. | "Eternal Waltz" | 4:29 |
| 6. | "Thinking" | 1:41 |
| 7. | "Part Yesterday" | 3:02 |
| 8. | "Walking in the Meadow" | 7:45 |
| 9. | "Evening Sun" | 2:44 |
| 10. | "Must Have Been a Miracle" | 2:00 |
| 11. | "Wondering" | 2:44 |
| 12. | "What Should I Do" | 1:46 |
| 13. | "Approaching the City" | 4:27 |
| 14. | "Didn't Really Die" | 4:27 |
| Total length: | 45:39 | |
Reception
Writing for AllMusic, Skip Jansen calls the album a collection of "fractured songs...drenched in the atonal ambience that makes his contribution such a standout. For lo-fi wayward mavericks, it doesn't come more outside than this".[1]
Seth Tisue, a Jandek discographer, has characterized White Box Requiem as "almost catatonically mopey and meandering... He sounds hopeless."[4] In contrast to Blue Corpse (1987), which Tisue describes as "a record about emotional devastation with some perspective in it", in White Box Requiem, the emotion comes "from totally inside it".[4]
In a review of White Box Requiem for In Music We Trust, Gary Gold writes, "[Jandek's] songs remain as starkly beautiful as a David Lynch opening shot, and the accompaniment (imagine handing your most ornery nine-year-old nephew a $29 guitar before locking him for three days in a windowless basement) remains as brutally poignant as ever."[5]
References
- 1 2 3 Jansen, Skip. "[Review] White Box Requiem". AllMusic. Retrieved April 27, 2023.
- 1 2 3 4 Salles, Andre (September 8, 2020). "#25. White Box Requiem (1996)". Tuesday morning 3 a.m. Retrieved April 27, 2023.
- ↑ Richardson, Mark (January 17, 2014). "Top 10 Revelations from The Wire's Interview With Jandek". Pitchfork. Retrieved April 27, 2023.
- 1 2 Wolk, Douglas (January 6, 2000). "Songs of a Lifetime". Chicago Reader. Retrieved April 27, 2023.
- ↑ Gold, Gary (June 2000). "[Review] Jandek – White Box Requiem (Corwood Industries)". In Music We Trust. Issue 31. Retrieved April 30, 2023.