news
Sound Advice: Jonestown 2: Jimmy Go Bye Bye by D-Sisive
Every Tuesday, Torontoist scours record store shelves in search of the city’s most notable new releases and brings you the best—or sometimes just the biggest—of what we’ve heard in Sound Advice.
Try as he did, D-Sisive couldn’t quite get all the elements together to release Jonestown 2 before the end of 2010. The plan was to follow up Vaudeville (released in June) and match the two-album output of 2009 (Let the Children Die and the first Jonestown album).
Whether or not the delay changed the final outcome by much (though, judging by his Twitter, the restless Toronto MC was working on songs in the studio till the last minute), it at least allowed for a reconsideration of a contemplated name change, and a pretty stellar collaboration with Fucked Up’s Damian Abraham. You can hear it for yourself—all for free—as of today.
Jonestown 2 is trademark D-Sisive: bold, smart, wordy, funny, dark. He’s been open about his painful family matters and personal demons both on previous albums and in the media, and the weight of it does still inevitably inform a lot of what he does. But here he’s also still cocky (“If”), self-deprecating (“Graffiti Wall”), smitten (“Morning in Barcelona”), and sentimental (“Derek from Northcliffe,” “Russell Peters”), not to mention still pulling from his seemingly endless supply of pop-culture references that, as always, strike a nuanced balance between obnoxious (though they’d make him famous if he were anyone else, as he says in “If”) and insightful, and are never in vain.
The production, courtesy of longtime collaborator Muneshine, is clean and eclectic and charged, a good example being “Wannabe,” (streaming above) the song recorded with Damian Abraham live (“live”?) on an episode of MuchMusic’s The Wedge. It also features live drums from Fucked Up’s Jonah Falco, offsetting the heavy bass of the beat. Abraham’s scream-rap is abrasive, but the sharp production makes an audible symmetry, making this “tag team heavyweight” not only interesting but exhilarating—not unlike Jonestown 2 as a whole. Download it for free from D-Sisive’s Bandcamp site, and dig that opening Dylan sample.