There’s a big difference between nostalgia and education. Jaks was not a band to look back, to be sentimental or bitch about the good ol’ days. Theirs was a sound savage and full of foreboding doom gothic punk rock, unruly, sharp-toothed. It was heavy and nasty and made you think of bands like The Birthday Party, Nation of Ulysses and Antioch Arrow. So, a collection of their work is education rather than a tribute. It’s education because all your favorite bands suck dick and you need to know what it was like back when this crazy fucking band stalked the Earth. Three One G’s Here Lies The Body of Jaks brings together everything Jaks recorded including 7″ tracks and the Steve Albini produced Hollywood Blood Capsules LP. “I love tragedy, completely”, Jaks singer Katrina Ford told Portland’s Willamette Week. “That is my personality, and that’s what I bring to the band. I don’t like women to play the victim’s role, so I try to turn the tables. In the stories I tell, the women tend to be the victimizers”. It’s that predatory force and sepulchral darkness that Katrina, Sean Antanaitis, Jessica Ruffins and Shawn Gates brought to the table. Guitars clang and storm. Bass growls and digs at your ribs. Drums attack and roll like a funeral march. And Katrina howls and screeches and orates and sounds like meanest, punkest motherfucker out there. After that came Love Life, Sea of Tombs and Birdland, but this is the original document.
