Jucifer - I Name You Destroyer

I’ve been fumbling over words, phrases, sentences, genres and descriptions of just how I could encapsulate Jucifer’s absolutely confounding release I Name You Destroyer into a few hundred words of verbosity. So, first, forget succinct pigeonholing genres and retract all preconceived notions of what women in rock usually portray – it’s all about to be annihilated. Jucifer is a boyfriend-girlfriend pair of musicians who wield their crushing guitars and propulsive drums like a Melvins tweaked noise experiment; but they assert you that they are the premium rock blend by stating they, “recorded without ProTools, loops, samples, studio musicians, big shots or lackeys,” in their liner notes. And this is precisely where previously drawn lines blur, genres become dismantled and jaws begin to drop to the floor. Although Jucifer unleashes rock the size of mountains from your stereo, Amber Valentine [for the most part] concocts the ultimate antagonist with whispers that hang in the ethereal stratosphere around the snow-capped peaks of the music. With any other vocalist I Name You Destroyer would glide by with nothing but rock ‘n’ roll abrasives scarring your ear lobes, but Jucifer places lulling ultra-feminine Portishead-like vocal beauties upon the think distortion of sound below it to sculpt a most intriguing dichotomy of music. While the opener, “Little Fever,” paves the way with such a template and the listener becomes consciously comfortable under such a peculiar composite, “Queen B” then fractures what you thought Jucifer encompassed into shards of splintered rock primordial soup. Valentine’s out-of-nowhere searing screams on “Queen B” come along with such visceral power that it would make the whole conglomerate of girl trio Kittie, sludge-shit-rockers of Otep and hardcore wannabes in Still Breathing blush with inferiority. However, as different as Valentine’s bellowing is on such a track, it actually makes up the solitary low point of the album; but don’t worry, Jucifer quickly recuperates with “Memphis” – a piano laden journey that eventually bursts into sonic black holes of My Bloody Valentine-like feedback via Sonic Youth. Throbbing bass lines, ambient electronic abstractions, squalls of ultra-violet feedback, seductively vaporous vocals, piano compositions, romantic acoustic licks, incendiary drum signatures and crunching lowbrow rock – it’s all here in it’s pinnacle apex of performance. I Name You Destroyer is the underrated album of the year thus far and it’s surely destined to destroy the consciousness of conformity and build it’s own indefinable orb that demonstrates and stretches every bit of music that the term “rock” implies. [www.jucifer.com]