Album Review: Andrew Jackson Jihad - Christmas Island

“I fell into a coffin full of orphans/And they all had been slaughtered by a website-making man with music in his heart.” Not the clearest lyric, but it's surreal, morbid and just slightly humorous, which is Andrew Jackson Jihad's modus operandi. Falling into that niche obtuse-lyrics-and-antiquated-instrumentation category alongside The Mountain Goats and Okkervil River, AJJ have long been stalwarts of a bewitching, powerful form of live indie acoustics, and Christmas Island is what everyone's been waiting for. Part punk diatribe, part personal exploration, it stretches and splits between intensely powerful imagery and ideas.