61. Jacobites, "It'll All End Up in Tears" (1985)

(listen)

The Jacobites were a British band of the '80s consisting of Nikki Sudden and Dave Kusworth with sometime support from Sudden's brother Epic Soundtracks (one of the great pseudonyms), Mark Lemon, and others. On a downloading tear a few years ago, after hearing of Sudden's death in 2006, I foraged for everything I could find by them and their various antecedents such as Swell Maps. But my favorite remains the first album I heard by them, which I knew in 1986 as The Ragged School (culled from their 1984 and 1985 British releases, Jacobites and Robespierre's Velvet Basement) and which contains this, "Ambulance Station," "Big Store," and other essentials. Taking the easy way out, here's from an album review I wrote for a Seattle paper then: "Naturally cliches are to be avoided, but what we have in the Jacobites is the source of some beautiful noise. Simple as that. The guitars are loud, deliberate and raw, sometimes spare and sweet, the tunes good enough to hum days later, and the overriding obsessions (love and death, what else?) communicated so perfectly, so powerfully, that beauty and horror are revealed as the same thing. Well, aren't they? ... [The Jacobites] deserve success, of course, but it'll never happen. More likely they'll find themselves in the same position as fellow obscuros Alex Chilton, or Nick Drake, whose haunting sensibilities the Jacobites occasionally match, even outdo. But at least we've got 'Ambulance Station.' And the bruising attack of 'Big Store.' And the Mick and Keith vocal harmonies of 'Hurt Me More.' And Dave Kusworth singing, 'And she feels / dead for just one moment.' And, and, and."