Jim O’Rourke’s first solo album after parting ways with his Gastr del Sol partner David Grubbs works like a stylistic palette cleanser. After constantly pushing their ambitions forward with every Gastr release, O’Rourke took a chance to indulge in something simultaneously simpler and more complex with Bad Timing. It’s a contradiction because these songs are generally more musically complicated than anything Gastr did, yet their main focus is always on melody. A track like “94 the Long Way” grows ever denser as it piles on instrumentation over its 13-minute run time, but sounds simpler in the wake of the acoustic-ambient creepiness of songs like “Work from Smoke” or the electronic noise of “Hello Spiral” from the older albums.
This album sets a very good trajectory of where O’Rourke would be going with future albums like Eureka and Insignificance, but while those albums focused on pop and rock respectively Bad Timing shows O’Rourke taking his John Fahey worship to a majestic extreme. And much like Fahey’s best work, this entirely instrumental album never makes you miss vocals; O’Rourke’s guitar playing is so emotive he practically makes it sing.
Certain moments grab you more and more upon repeated listens. The opener “There’s Hell in Hello but More in Goodbye” manages to jump from a bouncy lighthearted melody to intricately rhythmic guitar to a darker sequence of low pulses punctuated by harmonics so beautiful that you don’t even notice the growing piano chords in the background. The song goes from sounding off the cuff and silly to sincere and tragic in only a couple minutes. Meanwhile the title track sounds downright magical as it builds a hypnotic guitar groove that eventually leads into mournful horns. Nothing, though, feels more satisfying than the feedback soaked finale “Happy Trails” which starts sounding like Fahey being backed by Earth and inexplicably ends by exploding into the jolliest possible combination of strings, trombones, and a ukulele solo… because why the hell not.
Describing elements of these songs can get across the inventiveness O’Rourke is playing with, but there’s no way to describe the genuine sense of fun when you hear this album, or the way the songs (ranging from 10 to 13 minutes) make you wish they went on forever. Though this solo record marked the end of one of the most creative musical collaborations of the 90s, O’Rourke sounds so full of ideas and life that it’s hard not to find it cathartic. Plus, I’ve tried and it is impossible to hear that ukulele solo without getting a great big grin on your face.
[Illustration: Mat Pringle]
