Since uprooting himself from the border city of Windsor, Ontario to the perpetually buzzing Montreal music scene, his hand-drawn animations and hallucinatory illustrations have graced the covers of multiple albums per year.
At age 4, he started playing drums in the church where his mom worked as a cleaner, but could only find hardcore and death metal groups to join in the sparse local scene.
Winnowing down 40 half-finished demos to 13 overstuffed songs, Jacobs handed the album off to mastering engineer Oliver Ackermann from A Place to Bury Strangers, a band that has made a career out of finding the sweet spot within squalls of noise.
Jacobs’ lyrics drift between banal observations and an oddball cast of characters, pushing his songs into surreal realms. The bongo-propelled “Christopher Robbins” reimagines the Air America author as a boss writing his paychecks.
As the song choogles on a single guitar note, Jacobs waxes depressedly: “This town has got me under some sort of spell/I was the half rich no good for nothing/Never amount to anything, never going to make it.” But is it really so bad to build new worlds on his lonesome if there’s no one else around? “When I’m not feeling music I can spend a lot of time drawing,” Jacobs has said.