Jackamo (Reissue)

Remastered at Southern Studios in 2010 by Harvey Birrell, Little Annie's 1987 album Jackamo has been reissued and beautifully repackaged with brand new artwork from Little Annie's own paintings. The CD is packaged in a digipack and comes with extensive liner notes from Robert R Conroy, which shed light into the events around the recording.

Jackamo is probably one of the best LPs you have never heard, but once within its realm tread lightly and carefully. Here there be monsters. The great American author of weird fiction, HP Lovecraft, once remarked that for a tale of terror to be truly memorable "(a) certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present". Such outer, unknown forces are at play here. Annie took her own personal fear and pain, and transmuted same into something existential. This is truly music from the haunted dancehall. "Unexplainable dread" – in both the Edgar Allen Poe and Lee 'Scratch' Perry sense of this term – runs riot. But what keeps this LP from sliding into the pit of its own dark night of the soul is Annie herself – her pluck, her humor, her graceful facility with the English language and most of all her humanity.

Released to rapturous reviews on the fledgling British indie label One Little Indian, Jackamo should have set the world on its ear. But as luck would have it, another band on One Little Indian happened to release a record at just about the same time as Annie did. The label was utterly blind-sided by the sudden, huge success of the Sugarcubes' first LP. In the ensuing months, as the label scrambled to deal with its new megstars, other releases on the label – including Jackamo – got lost in the shuffle. – Robert R. Conroy