White Box Requiem

White Box Requiem is the 25th album by Jandek, and his only for the year 1996. Released as Corwood Industries #0763, it is essentially a "concept album" about death, loss, and a man who opens a mysterious white "Pandora's box", which some have speculated is a coffin.[2] There are 14 songs with acoustic guitar, half of them with vocals.[1][2] The instrumental pieces are sparse and experiment with echo, with "restless" passages that music critic Andre Salles has described as "consistently inventive atonal plonking that never sits still".[2]

White Box Requiem
Studio album by
Jandek
Released1996
GenreOutsider, folk
Length45:39
LabelCorwood Industries
ProducerCorwood Industries
Jandek chronology
Glad to Get Away
(1994)		 White Box Requiem
(1996)		 I Woke Up
(1997)
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[1]

After not releasing any music in 1995, Jandek returned with White Box Requiem the following year.[2] According to a rare interview with Jandek that appeared in The Wire, the album had originally been planned as a song-by-song response to Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair.[3]

Track listing
No.TitleLength
1."The Glade"1:23
2."White Box"3:48
3."Second Thoughts"1:40
4."Concrete Steps"3:43
5."Eternal Waltz"4:29
6."Thinking"1:41
7."Part Yesterday"3:02
8."Walking in the Meadow"7:45
9."Evening Sun"2:44
10."Must Have Been a Miracle"2:00
11."Wondering"2:44
12."What Should I Do"1:46
13."Approaching the City"4:27
14."Didn't Really Die"4:27
Total length:45:39

Reception

Writing for AllMusic, Skip Jansen calls the album a collection of "fractured songs...drenched in the atonal ambience that makes his contribution such a standout. For lo-fi wayward mavericks, it doesn't come more outside than this".[1]

Seth Tisue, a Jandek discographer, has characterized White Box Requiem as "almost catatonically mopey and meandering... He sounds hopeless."[4] In contrast to Blue Corpse (1987), which Tisue describes as "a record about emotional devastation with some perspective in it", in White Box Requiem, the emotion comes "from totally inside it".[4]

In a review of White Box Requiem for In Music We Trust, Gary Gold writes, "[Jandek's] songs remain as starkly beautiful as a David Lynch opening shot, and the accompaniment (imagine handing your most ornery nine-year-old nephew a $29 guitar before locking him for three days in a windowless basement) remains as brutally poignant as ever."[5]

References
  1. Jansen, Skip. "[Review] White Box Requiem". AllMusic. Retrieved April 27, 2023.
  2. Salles, Andre (September 8, 2020). "#25. White Box Requiem (1996)". Tuesday morning 3 a.m. Retrieved April 27, 2023.
  3. Richardson, Mark (January 17, 2014). "Top 10 Revelations from The Wire's Interview With Jandek". Pitchfork. Retrieved April 27, 2023.
  4. Wolk, Douglas (January 6, 2000). "Songs of a Lifetime". Chicago Reader. Retrieved April 27, 2023.
  5. Gold, Gary (June 2000). "[Review] Jandek – White Box Requiem (Corwood Industries)". In Music We Trust. Issue 31. Retrieved April 30, 2023.
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