"AJJ are, in their own persuasive, relevant, and coaxingly sarcastic ways, more on the pulse of a new human condition than ever before."
If you’ve listened to the new AJJ album Disposable Everything, then you’ll know it’s an
experience strewn with sarcasm, some soft composition, baby pandas dying, snarky comments directed at you, and bright, skilful instrumentation throughout. But it’s an experience that definitely ended and is pushed back into the past as a nice memory. Maybe you listened to it with a friend whom you might fall out with on any occasion, or a partner who could leave you tomorrow. Or even your cherishing parents who could well love or hate you and disregard you as soon as you don’t stay in contact for an ample number of months. If you haven’t yet, maybe you’ve read enough there to be a bit less interested in listening and might not bother. Either way, you’ve most probably thrown away the music you’ve heard from a device you’ll one day throw away, while wearing clothes and believing beliefs and loving loves and hating hates that you will one day dispose of. Thus exposes the rut that AJJ (Andrew Jackson Jihad) find themselves in on their new album.
Straight out the gate, Sean Bonnette regards a ‘Strawberry (Probably).’ In turning over
this mysterious item and potential berry, the opener comments on disposable dignity and our collective responsibilities to care for the planet. Its initial chirpy calls for attention soon dissolve to sourly analyse the resultant grief we are experiencing at the world’s decline through global warming, and how these feelings only really exist as transiently and throw-away-able. There need not be any care for the environment and for you to be comfortable with your actions. The freeing (supposedly and blindly redemptive) feeling received from this fact is emphasised through desperate loops of Sean calling “everything is free now.”
‘Dissonance’ gets rid of morality. Probably. But still paints the potential benefits of
nursing plants on your windowsill, but under the guises of heavy uncertainty and the guessing games of what is actually “good” for you, before then abruptly giving way to the twisted funniness of ‘Moon Valley High,’ which shines with the dark storytelling of how potential friendships that never ended up happening and are consequently never thought about. Instead, they are tossed into the bottomless pit of useless possibilities.
As the most brutal and to-the-point single to precede the album ‘Death Machine’ hollers
at screeching, driving-pace to retell to the listener that they are even less than a Ship of Theseus-style component for whatever structure of things they believe they belong to. Rebelling and raging against a machine that they are a minute, minute, very, very expendable part of. Disposing their energy, strengths, and ‘important’ voice to the materialistic void of unfillable gain.
‘White Ghosts,’ however, gives its previous track an astounding contrast, exchanging the
overwhelming, overpowering frustration with a quiet, self-disposing reflection on how charming, nostalgic thoughts of an old lover have become distilled into the disposable, swift thoughts of masturbating. With its softer composition of sax and daydreaming strums of guitar to match, the quality and necessity of human-to-human love is questioned by replacing one half with your own distorted memories and idealisations.
The album’s title track embarks on the journey linking doubts about the selfishness of
the world to sub-human living and the disposability of people in such a position. The brute unimportance of those who might consider themselves ‘normal.’ And then their disposable family, dignity, the disposable holocene, packaging, and TV screens. Even their WWF subscriptions are called into question as ‘The Baby Panda’ paid for and disposably only thought about for comfort is unfortunately “not coming baaaaack.” Neither are any other endangered beings on this planet, for that matter.
Following this we receive the childhood nightmares of ‘A Thought of You;’ ‘Candles of
Love’’s poignant and flickering, snuffling piano ballad; and the very rock-and-roll build-up and culmination of ‘I Hate Rock and Roll Again’ – where AJJ play rock to tell us they hate rock and seem to not so easily be able to dispose of it in their music because they’re AJJ and that’s what they do with minute-long tracks.
Later still, after spoofing the likes of Simon and Garfunkel and the Cranberries, the
Stooges get a taste of the AJJ-type cover with ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog 2.’ The track threads a willing disposing of humanity for other people. To live in someone’s laundry and be the very fork they eat with. To never sit back in yourself as an individual but live through others and, not for the first time on this project, dispose of anything and everything that can possibly make you you.
Using ‘In the Valley’ to close the album, AJJ reach a favourable armchair conclusion
that accepting the end being neigh might well be a step well taken in throwing away what hope you might have for the world. Progressing from deleting wind from the valleys to finding the taste of awry plans in every meal, the closing high notes dispose well of the progression made through the album.
Throughout the wide array of folk and punk styles explored and utilised on Disposable
Everything, AJJ leave the listener in their barren and wasteful consumerist context with a dissatisfaction at how they have been told to make their feelings temporary and take the meaningfulness away from their relationships, graduation certificates, promotions, and teddy bears. To not contemplate your position as a slowly turning cog in the dying machine of the whole system following this album is impossible. Its musical and social precision are equally astonishing; glowing with a radiant boldness and no-shits-given attitude unparalleled by any such attempts at similar criticisms held in the indie rock scene today.
While the days of Sean yelling that a cannibal, child pornographer, and politician live
inside all of us, there’s still a fair bit of people peoplin’, reckoning, and bravery here. With a softer composition and instrumental quality spread throughout. All is signed, sealed, and delivered with a postscript ‘get your fucking act together’ that is so essentially AJJ and fine-tuned to and beyond the standards of their opus Knife Man from over a decade ago. In all its classically pissed-off and bittersweet cuteness of pieces, the contrasts of this album prove that AJJ are, in their own persuasive, relevant, and coaxingly sarcastic ways, more on the pulse of a new human condition than ever before. And that we should maybe not dispose of the pertinence of this album’s message too quickly.
Just a thought.
DISPOSABLE EVERYTHING – AJJ – 9. II: Still AJJin’.
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