Pocketwatches haunt the album art and promo graphics for Four Twenty Three, an album that takes its name from Monkey Jacket's eerie recurring run-ins with that number and time. Between that, the three long years it took to release this second album, and the rhythmic mayhem within it, a part of me wonders if the band is troubled by some distorted grasp of time, and I think back to Salvador Dalí's surrealist painting of melting clocks, The Persistence of Memory. It's a little-known fact, however, that Dalí's magnum opus was inspired by a piece of cheese. I'm not kidding. It was the softness of the camembert (mixed with a fierce headache) that led him to consider how concepts of softness and hardness apply to the perception of time. So perhaps it is Monkey Jacket's own history of absurdity (for starters, their name is Monkey Jacket) that offers a similar explanation for Four Twenty Three's own twisted genius.
The dark, obscure images of this new album's art are a big switch from the debut's cartoony cover and no less indicative of the change in sound behind them. Sure, in between bright, skankable upbeats, Monkey Jacket has always made sure to remind us the value of a face-melting guitar riff. The band takes that even further in this album, drawing more from their progressive and classic rock influences in tracks like "Won't Somebody Start a Riot" and "Irony." Vocally, Mick Maslowski has a punchy blasé that bends perfectly with their strange range of styles, even hitting the soulful falsetto of "Willow Tree" but just as well covering the album's pushier and paranoid tones.
Ska fans, worry not. At the very least, "Hello, Solo" returns with the same tongue-in-cheek goofiness it scored in the last album. On the other hand, don't be fooled by the horns behind "The Way Things Go," a disturbing murder tale which--dare I say it--just might be the musical manifestation of The Joker. And on the whole, Monkey Jacket mostly pulls off a sort of serrated punk pop, a style with all the catchy accessibility of a great single but cut deep with revenge's bitterest bite.
Monkey Jacket have always been ones for experimentation, and if there's really a label that could describe all of their songs (or every part of one song, for that matter), it's "unpredictable." Playing out like some unorthodox concoction of switchblade rhythms, sinister synth and distortion, and a bass backbone like lightning, Four Twenty Three is obviously the product of surrealist mad scientist brilliance. Or camembert.