TRYING TO THINK ABOUT JENTRI'S Our Lady of the Kitchen
If Jentri Jollimore had murdered two of her dearest friends and set up residence in their cabin in order to make this record, I might be tempted to say that this music was worth it. Fortunately, she was allowed to occupy that cabin in solitude for a few days without killing anyone, so no reductionist Nietzschean justifications are necessary.
I have come to realize that OUR LADY OF THE KITCHEN is a
distinctive, spiritually vibrant entity; a creature who is partly Ms. Jollimore (and thus utterly unique) and partly universal (and thus utterly unique). Some women really do belong in the kitchen: the kitchen full of beat-up violins, whiskey, static, cigarettes, steaks frying in blood and vinegar, and ghosts that only that woman can properly control. Our Lady of the Kitchen is a comforting presence, but not a submissive one. She has claws, but uses them mostly to caress animals that like their bellies scratched a bit roughly. A gentleman couldn't have made this record. Nor could any other lady have made this record. But many ladies and gentleman will make records, after they hear this one. And they will have learned something that only the Lady of the Kitchen could possibly teach them. They will have learned that there is nothing special, superior, or even particularly desirable about virginity.
We come to this kitchen when we can't act respectable anymore. We come to this kitchen when being respectable has revealed itself to be an unbearable obscenity. We come to be greeted by the hilarity that flows from grace and mercy and humility and confession, aware that these things have no visible power in our society; and that power is shit, unless it happens to be the power of songs like these.
T.S. Eliot wrote in his Four Quartets that humility is endless.
Humility is the luxury of the confident.
We come to cry in this Lady's lap and have our hairs tousled by her ten nimble weapons. We come to smell her tobacco and the sweat of her brow. We come to watch her cut things to pieces on battered cutting boards.
This is profoundly broken music. As Leonard Cohen once sang: “There's a crack in everything/that's how the light gets in". That's the kind of brokenness I'm talking about. In an age wherein so many people take medication merely to avoid powerful emotions, it's easy to forget: what some call "manic-depression" is a valid, and, sometimes, healthy and necessary state of mind. The peaks and the abysses can blow kisses at each other. I'm not saying that this album is manic-depressive, much less that the person who made it is. And I'm not crusading against medicine; this album is medicine, but it's good for more people than most medicine currently is. You can add this record to your other medicines; or you can use it to replace medicines that you're sick of taking.
Much of this record is gleeful, in a distinctly girlish way (yes, distinctly girlish; if you think that's sexist, well, I think you're sexist; there is a certain kind of glee that is recognizably feminine
in character, and you have to love a woman to understand that). Unabashed glee, like unabashed sorrow, can be a healing force. Here the two are joined.
The only worthy defense against the pain of being mortal & therefore inherently imperfect & incomplete (though these songs & sounds are perfect, and I can't possibly explain how that happened) is complete openness: a willingness to see the syntax in certain awkwardnesses, to be stunned by the terrifying fragility of beauty. A deliberate defenselessness; a defenselessness made possible only by great strength. And if you think that's cornball, well, I hope you die, so that someone who cared about you can listen to this record without you.
You've gotta spend time alone with this music. Not alone in the sense that one can be "alone" with a friend or even a lover, but alone in the only truest sense: alone with the other, alien person who just happens to be yourself.
--Luke Buckham
Luke Buckham - Liner Notes to OUR LADY OF THE KITCHEN (Mar 13, 2007)