Name: Jordaan Mason and the Horse MuseumFrom: Toronto, Ontario
Story: His soft, silly music is meaningful, magical
Sound: Acoustic music as an open wound. With horns!
When I introduced you to the Rural Alberta Advantage back in June, prior to the Saddle Creek release of their stirring first LP, Hometowns (truly one of 2009's best debut albums), it seemed safe to assume they would be the best Neutral-Milk-Hotel-influenced, aching acoustic act to come out of Canada in 2009.
Yet, a young songwriter from Toronto named Jordaan Mason has blown that idea out of the water. With his nasally wail and lyrical grotesquerie making it a dead giveaway, it's clear that Mason is a Mangum acolyte. But, where others may gravitate to the pop side of NMH, Mason sounds like a guy whose entire musical existence has been inspired by repeat exposure to "Oh, Comely."
Three-and-a-half years in the making, Mason's Divorce Lawyers I Shaved My Head LP is a work of uneasy listening. Sounding like an hour-long bloodletting, its 14 songs are an open emotional wound from which the songsmith spills the confessions of his soiled soul. Backed by a baroque nine-piece band he calls The Horse Museum, Mason strums his guitar hard and throttles out words in a rough-hewn caterwaul, whilst marching-band horns and musical saw and piano and woodwinds and cardboard box drums dance deliriously.
From the record's opening line —the tres-Mangum "my mouth is filled with his ovaries/I hold them here between my teeth"— it's clear that Mason is no garden variety lyricist. Across Divorce Lawyers I Shaved My Head he sings of bodily functions and bodily failures, of decay and disease, of genitals and sexual degeneracy, of horses and Henry Darger, of snow and Simon and Garfunkel, of an apocalypse set upon the world in 1990.
Or, as Mason himself puts it: "semi-illiterate songs about sex and sickness and the decline of (stupid f**king) western civilization." Indeed.
- Visit: Jordaan Mason on Myspace
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