Jump On It

It’s been ten years since Bill Orcutt released A History of Every One, a compendium of hacksaw renditions of American standards on acoustic guitar — and since ten years is a blink of an eye, you are forgiven for not immediately realizing that we’ve gone an entire decade waiting for Jump On It, the next Orcutt solo acoustic record
As those of us of “a certain age” will tell you (ad nauseam), a decade is a blink of an eye containing an infinity of experiential moments, and if this record is any gauge, the weight of those experiences have squashed Orcutt’s rough edges, feathered his stop-motion timing into a languid lyrical flow, and snapped the shackles tethering his instant compositional skills to the imperative to deconstruct guitar history. In short, Jump On It is a collection of canonical, mature acoustic guitar soli to contrast against the fractured downtown conceits of previous acoustic releases. For those paying attention to the arc of Orcutt’s electric records, which chart a course from Quine’s choppiness to Thompsonian / Verlaine-ian flow, it should be no surprise that the ten year gap between acoustic records should expose a similar underlying journey