Jeffrey Lewis & the Junkyard [Live] @ Manchester Academy

5th May 2009

May 14, 2009, 09:38 PM

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My relationship with Jeffrey Lewis has recently been on the rocks. Snippets I heard from his new album did not fill me with hope, and I decided that this gig would be the make or break. I was willing to put in the effort and come to this gig, to try and recapture all those happy years we shared, but was he willing to put in the effort and write some half decent songs?

Jeffrey Lewis has long been producing lo-fi folk (I refuse to call it anti-folk. That label confuses me. It’s goddamn folk) records that, since his signing to Rough Trade in 2001, have become increasingly successful. But success is not, as you know, the greatest indicator of an album. The later albums have become generic indie rock, and are unfortunately sounding more and more like his brother Jack’s music. (Jack has played in both Jeffrey & the Junkyard, and released albums under his own band Jack Lewis & Twigs. I was drawn in to one of Jack’s albums by Tyler Drosdeck’s bloody brilliant artwork for his CD Lvov Goes to Emandee w/ my Unicef Box, after which I was sure to never again judge a book by its cover. It’s generic teen jump-along rock, distorted guitar shouty vocals and recorded in what sounds like a grotty basement, which is incidentally where this album should be confined to.) It’s the early albums such as It’s The Ones Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through that I found to be the more impressive, with Jeffrey’s idiosyncratic style of singing- fitting more words into one breath than I could imagine whilst keeping lyrics witty, insightful and thoughtful, and guitar picking that purrs quietly underneath these complexities.

The ensemble of Jeffrey Lewis and the Junkyard consisted of Jeffrey and Jack Lewis on guitar and bass, Fletcher on the keyboard and vocals and Dave on the drums. However, throughout this gig it didn’t seem like just one band on stage. As I had expected, there was a jarring dissimilarity in the kind of music played; the folk-guitar-picking with post-punk lyrics that Jeffrey Lewis does so well and generic indie pop song with mundane thoughtless lyrics.

The latter resembled the kind of solo work that Jack Lewis released, and I felt that it dragged down the performance somewhat. It just didn’t play on the musician’s strengths- Jeffrey’s right hand can play out some mean travis picking, but when he tried to play some lead guitar riffs in these new songs his left hand just wasn’t up to par. Jeffrey’s signature singing style is also lost in these songs, and Jack’s vocals just weren’t up to replacing them.

There were some songs that did carry through some of the elements of songwriting that Jeffrey Lewis excels at. Just as I was beginning to pine over Jeffrey’s lost talent at writing songs he played a new one that just blew me away. ‘If I couldn’t take it anymore’ combined simple guitar chord sequence with lyrics that were incredibly witty and wonderfully pessimistic. It showed just how superfluous the other band members were, and allowed Jeffrey’s true talent to come through.

Jeffrey Lewis’ signature comic strips were shown intermittently, and whilst I may not be a massive fan of his art work, it was great to see an artist combining both visual and audio to provide a kind of education to his audience. It was a great example of creating awareness through music, and subjects such as Communist China and his encore of A Complete History of Punk Rock and its development on the lower eastside between 1950 and 1975 showed Jeffrey Lewis’ humble desire for the audience to appreciate matters much bigger than this singular gig.

However, In spite of a near perfect rendition of a complete history of punk, it would seem that this is where Jeffrey Lewis and I part ways. I hope you’ll forgive the sentimentalism of this review, but it’s been quite an emotional turmoil. It’s been a great run Jeff, and whilst it may have been disheartening to see the music turn down the mainstream route, it was worth going to the gig just to see the classics. Jeffrey Lewis is an extremely talented songwriter, despite what Pitchfork may say, and he is good at what he does. Unfortunately, what he does in some of his new songs isn’t what he is good at. If he could lose the ‘junkyard’ and go ‘back when I was 4’ maybe we could make this work, but sometimes it’s best to just let a band go.

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