Psychic Lines is the work of Phil Jacob, a Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter, musician, and producer who landed in New York by way of Cincinnati, Louisville, and a childhood spent moving from state to state. Horror Comedy is his sixth album under the Psychic Lines name, out May 15th, with cassettes following a week later on May 22nd via Fuzzy Warbles. Longtime Third Eye readers may already know Jacob from another corner of his world — he plays in the collaborative quintet Vague Plot, whose Crying in 9 we covered a couple of years back.
The title is the thesis. “This album is called Horror Comedy because that’s what it feels like we’re all living through right now,” Jacob says. “A bizarre B-movie on late-night TV.” He doesn’t soften the source of the dread, either — he rattles off government violence, corporate greed widening the gap, special interests pulling the strings — but Horror Comedy isn’t a protest record so much as a nervous laugh in the dark, the sound of someone watching the news and quietly hoping the whole thing turns out to be fiction. Jacob reaches for David Lynch to put a frame around it: “What a great time to be alive if you love the theatre of the absurd.”
There’s a neat bit of conceptual symmetry at work here. Where the previous Psychic Lines record, Sunset on Sunset, was about mistaking fiction for reality, Horror Comedy flips the script. Reality gets so strange that we mistake it for fiction, until nobody’s quite sure which side of the screen they’re standing on.
“We’re all vampires in our own weird ways,” Jacob offers, and the record takes him at his word: the vampire motif surfaces in the brief “Talkin’ About Vampires” and comes back to close things out with the thirty-two-second coda “Vampires 2: Slight Return,” a pair of fangs marking the record’s edges.
Sonically, Horror Comedy finds Jacob taking another of his sharp left turns. Psychic Lines has historically been a guitar-and-four-track operation rooted in freak folk and the literate singer-songwriter tradition, but this time the band steps fully into an electronic milieu. There are doctored drum samples, throbbing bass (some of it composed on early-’90s 8-bit music software, which is its own kind of haunted), and a darkwave synth-pop chill laid down beneath Jacob’s baritone, his frenetic guitar, and gusts of skronky alto sax.
It’s the rare record that name-checks Depeche Mode and Leonard Cohen in the same breath and earns both. Picture New Order’s pulse and the Cocteau Twins’ shimmer running underneath a songwriter with Warren Zevon’s gallows wit and Randy Newman’s satirical eye, and you’re somewhere in the neighborhood.
Jacob’s songs have always worked like short stories told by unreliable narrators, and Horror Comedy keeps that going across twelve tracks in a tight thirty-seven minutes — nothing overstays its welcome. Titles like “DKTR. Apathy,” “We Had a Nightcap,” “I Took a Nap Today,” and “Katie Bar the Door!” carry that off-kilter, half-dreamed quality, the sense of characters who can’t quite tell whether they’re awake.
Late in the record, “Don’t Tempt Me” brings a real curveball: Homeboy Sandman drops a verse, a rap feature threaded through a darkwave record, and somehow it fits the absurdist logic of the place. The title track, which has a music video to go with it, is the album in miniature. Jacob’s baritone delivers the bad news with a half-smile while the synths glitter coldly around him.
The whole thing was mixed and mastered by Mitch Rackin at Deep Dive, with a cover photo by Steve de Seve and just about everything else handled by Psychic Phil himself, though the live trio rounds out to a proper band: Dann Baker of Love Camp 7 and Eljin Marbles on bass, Nancy Polstein of Girls on Grass on drums, and Jacob on guitar and alto sax.
Horror Comedy is a record for anyone who likes their synth-pop with a cold streak and their songwriting smart and self-deprecating. Fans of Depeche Mode, New Order, the Cocteau Twins, and The Fall who also keep Leonard Cohen and Stephin Merritt in heavy rotation should find a lot to love here. It’s a funny, frightened, oddly comforting little album about not being able to tell the movie from the world outside the window. Catch it on late-night TV. Enjoy.
Check out Horror Comedy by Psychic Lines on Bandcamp here. Cassettes are out May 22nd via Fuzzy Warbles.
Support Psychic Lines by finding them at hellopsychiclines.com or on Bandcamp, Instagram, SoundCloud, YouTube, and Spotify.
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