Our last post covered the future of car insurance, it makes sense to follow that with a track which appears to be encouraging listeners to get their funeral care sorted.
Throughout the previous year, Jacob’s Mouse had been a regular feature on Kat’s Karavan with tracks from their LP, No Fish Shop Parking. They had shown that they could rock out or hold down a groove as well as anyone. Now, they were back on a new label (Wiiija) and with a new album, I’m Scared. The previous year’s Peel Session gave everyone some indications of what to expect, featuring as it did an early versions of the LP track, It’s A Thin Sound. Box Hole showed that while Jacob’s Mouse could still switch effortlessly from rock to funk, they were now throwing in both industrial metal and noise rock as well. Box Hole is one of those thrilling pieces of guitar music that comes along periodically, grabs the listener by the ear and shows us all just how fascinating and exciting rock music can be. There are at least three different cue points at which anyone listening to the track could find themselves leaping out of their chair to get to the dancefloor, and this serves to keep it a constant delight each time it’s played.
1) Acid heads will be able to attune themselves to the trebly dynamics of the track’s opening section as Hugo Boothby’s piercing yet melodic line intersects with his twin brother, Jebb’s contemplative bass line.
2) Dub freaks will find themselves honing in on the Butterfly suits they are watching, watching section.
3) Everybody gets to have a good old fashioned early 90s mosh around during the What am I s’posed to say?/What do I have to say? thrash section.
I had initially thought the theme of the song was about getting away from the world and hiding, with box hole being use as a variation on foxhole, but I now find myself agreeing with the consensus that the song is actually about death. This makes perfect sense if we regard:
a) a box hole to mean a resting place for a coffin.
b) the butterfly suits they are watching, watching to mean angels and spirits which walk alongside us, waiting to welcome us into their domain.
c) What am I s’posed to say?/What do I have to say? sounds like the desperate cry of someone trying and failing to find the words to comfort the bereaved.
If that all sounds a bit scattershot, then it’s at least of a piece with Jacob’s Mouse’s methods of working which were to pack in all the ideas that they could to a song and see what happened. I’ve written before about my theory that because their singer, Sam Marsh, was also the drummer, it made sense not to write reams and reams of lyrics. Instead of writing lyrical epics, the band came up with single, repetitive lines which they could build the different stylistic sections of the song around. One of the strengths of this approach, as recorded in this article from B-Side Magazine, reprinted through repeatfanzine.co.uk is that it allowed the group to be one of the most experimental rock bands of the period.
Curiously though, Peel doesn’t appear to have embraced I’m Scared as much as No Fish Shop Parking. A look at the John Peel Wiki shows only 7 plays of I’m Scared material, against 11 plays from No Fish Shop Parking. Tellingly, Box Hole accounts for 3 of those plays.*
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