The Singles Jukebox

The highest score we’ve ever given to a song with “Jackie” in the title…

[Video][Website]
[6.50]

Hannah Jocelyn: I have a soft spot for “repression indie,” the kind of music I loved most before I came out and didn’t have to repress as much; the hard-panned acoustic guitar, tense drums, and Grian Chatten’s deadpan delivery hit all those buttons. Surprisingly, the lyrics leave just as big an impression — I thought it was about a failing relationship, but the actual message of struggling with Irish pride and a need to be respected fits even better. “What good is happiness to me/If I’ve to wield it carefully” is a great line in any context. A Hero’s Death did nothing for me lyrically, even as the production is likely the best of any record from this glut of post-punk, but this is a much more intriguing direction for the band and scene. Adding a point because the “boom sha-la-la”s are perfectly detached and the “do do do, la la la”s amusingly remind me of that one Police song. Docking a point for those out-of-phase snare hits at the beginning, because heaven forbid Dan Carey just make a single normal recording. 
[7]

John Pinto: Designed in a lab to be exactly my shit, and yet! We’ve got Robert Smith acoustics in one ear and King Krule jazziness in the other, but the middle plods along when it should be falling down a bottomless pit. You can see the way toward twilit sublimity around the 2:40 mark, when things pull back and it’s just that frantic-yet-muted acoustic and some ghostly sleigh bells, but by then it’s too little too late.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: The drums punch you in the throat, the bass kicks you in the eye and the guitars unleash a set of body blows. Grian chuckles cruelly as his nasal voice cuts through your tendons and bones, allowing the guitar to start jabbing you, then begin beating your legs with the blunt hacksaw Grian carries, before going back to the jabbing. Grian splits more and more of your veins, the guitar slicing with a knife, until the bass kicks your eye out, then hangs back to let the rest of the instruments attack and kill you. Grian slowly picks off each piece of your nervous system, then crushes your grey matter into a juicy pulp.
[9]

Alfred Soto: The verse melody is an annoyance, at times effacing the impact of the guitars, but we review so few entries in mid ’00s post-post-post-punk that I grade “Jackie Down the Line” on a curve.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: This has a very “Nevermind, but if Nirvana were Irish” vibe to it — and the super-thickly-accented, stand-out quality of Grian Chatten’s voice really makes it pop. I’ve mostly given up on whatever counts as rock music in 2022, but this is good enough to make me wanna hear more from ’em.
[8]

Scott Mildenhall: On one of the best singles of 2021 Grian Chatten’s voice was an asset. Sadly, Soulwax aren’t here now to harness it, leaving it broadly unengaging amid equally undynamic instrumentation and lyricism. Little of the promised doom arises, but drabness abounds.
[5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: I wish I didn’t have to call a Fontaines D.C. song “boring”. These lyrics are immensely undercooked; the central narrative is unfocused, there’s only one attempt at a metaphor, and the few lines that are actually eloquent are delivered clumsily, shoehorned into the meter as if blindly copied over from a more interesting Word document. I’ll spare you a recount of the band’s literature snob credentials (yes, they published two collections of poetry together, we know), but “Jackie Down the Line” scans as rudimentary compared to even previous singles. “Chequeless Reckless” similarly centers on an individual anecdote while still tying it to a broader societal critique. “Televised Mind” has far fewer lyrics, yet renders its characters’ lives in brutal detail. The music here, too, feels underdeveloped and indistinct. Fontaines D.C. have never been riff-reliant, but songs like “I Don’t Belong” and “A Hero’s Death” at least have memorable opening bars. “Jackie”‘s are more of a shapeless growl, immediately dwindling into irrelevance as the vocals appear. Using an acoustic rendition of the chorus as a bridge is also a notable structural crack; it can work under the right circumstances, but here just reads as trite. The most interesting thing about “Jackie Down the Line” is the titular phrase, which, like everything else, is never really unpacked or expanded upon. (Apart from a reference to Jackeens.)
[4]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: The bass chords feel like something stuck in the back of your throat as the rhythm pushes forward, quiet strums propelling dense lyrics. It’s a song you’d have to hack apart with a machete, like a shed covered in ivy. It’s holding something precious, but you don’t quite remember what it is, and it would be grueling, frustrating work to break inside and find out. And yet, every time you see it, it challenges you to take a swing.
[8]