How Jak Lizard manages to make music that, from one song to the next, feels eclectic, taken as a whole, feels so adventurous, genre-hopping, and boundary-pushing, yet still feels like a cohesive body of work is a joy to behold. It speaks volumes about where the post-genre music maker finds themselves today, at least for those who make the most of having been liberated from the shackles of expectation and genre, sonic tribalism, and musical tradition.
So, Vulnerable Forms isn’t an album that is easily summed up. Yet, its songs are so hooky and accessible, a strange blend of outsider and commercial…like a Trojan Horse being dragged into the mainstream before anyone realizes the damage it is about to do to the status quo.
Take “Crazy Bitch”: both the most addictive slice of warped, indie-infused R&B you will have heard this year and the most brilliant piece of out-there, outsider, alternative pop. “Not Benny’s Song” is a poised pop piece, being occasionally pummelled with rock guitars, and “Good Kid Charlie” is as fractured, changeable and challenging as the breakup it describes.
“County Fair” sees us out, a song with more than a few echoes of 90’s indie and 80’s college rock yet still sounding as if it is beating a path to a bright new musical future. Well, everything is cyclical after all, and this, like everything else found here, feels as if it is preparing the way for the echoes of old scenes to take root in the music to come.
Like all the best music, Vulnerable Forms is hard to describe… if I could describe it easily, it would mean you have heard it all before. So this is like nothing you have heard before, yet is somehow totally familiar as it hits your musical soul. How does he do that? I have no idea and i don’t need to know as long as this lizard king and jak-of-all-genres keeps making albums as great as this!
