Jackson Jackson - The Fire is on the Bird (Album)

Our society is doomed my friends. We’ve been living a life of careless decadence for so long now that there seems to be no going back. We spend more time looking at the stars in Hollywood than we do the stars in our night sky and we’re obsessed with fame, money and power. But, you see, Jackson Jackson know something that most of us don’t know… that is, of course, that there’s a race of beings that lives in the centre of our earth. They’ve been there for ages now - just chillin’ and watching as we slowly kill the ‘crust of the pie’ they’re living in. Now they’re fed up, they’ve sent their spies (the ‘freaks’) to make the way and they’re starting their invasion to save the earth from it’s evolved, but insane, overlords…. all of which, fortunately, makes perfect fodder for a concept album!

The Fire Is On The Bird is that album and Jackson Jackson (a collaboration between Harry Angus from the Cat empire and producer and composer Jan Skubiszewski, aka J Skub.) use it as a forum for some social commentary via a mix of almost every single style of music imaginable. The opening track ‘A Hole in the Garden’, for example, starts out with some slow-burning delta blues, but then morphs into a Bollywood hip-hop jam. The rest of the album veers from big band swing with Brazilian favela beats (on ‘The International Society of Bad Dancers’) to fairly straight hip-hop (on ‘Angel Dust’) to big-beat electro (on ‘Intelligent Evolved and Insane’). Jackson Jackson have packed a crapload of ideas onto this album and for the most part the results are awesome. While tracks like ‘Angel Dust’ and the ‘The Flicker and the Spark’ miss the mark, tracks like ‘Cats, Rats and Pigeons’ (the first single), ‘International Society of Bad Dancers’ and ‘Down to the River’ all have a huge sound that’s as catchy as the plague (thanks to some slick production from Jan). Harry’s lyrics tackle the ills of today’s society but with his simple, playful delivery things never get too heavy. Jackson Jackson point out society’s problems without offering many solutions, but that doesn’t seem to be the point of it all - they freely admit that they ‘…don’t know how to change the world’ on ‘Lonely Ooh’.

Basically, what it all boils down to is that Jackson is fun – it’s good music, with some great packaging and even a few well made video clips to clench the deal. What more you could ask for when the world is falling down around your ears?

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