White Box Requiem
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White Box Requiem is the 25th album by Jandek, and his only for the year 1996. Released as Corwood Industries #0763, it is essentially a "concept album" about death, loss, and a man who opens a mysterious white "Pandora's box", which some have speculated is a coffin.<ref name=":1">Template:Cite web</ref> There are 14 songs with acoustic guitar, half of them with vocals.<ref name="AllMusic" /><ref name=":1" /> The instrumental pieces are sparse and experiment with echo, with "restless" passages that music critic Andre Salles has described as "consistently inventive atonal plonking that never sits still".<ref name=":1" />
After not releasing any music in 1995, Jandek returned with White Box Requiem the following year.<ref name=":1" />
Track listing
Reception
Writing for AllMusic, Skip Jansen calls the album a collection of "fractured songs...drenched in the atonal ambience that makes his contribution such a standout. For lo-fi wayward mavericks, it doesn't come more outside than this".<ref name="AllMusic" />
Seth Tisue, a Jandek discographer, has characterized White Box Requiem as "almost catatonically mopey and meandering... He sounds hopeless."<ref name=":0" /> In contrast to Blue Corpse (1987), which Tisue describes as "a record about emotional devastation with some perspective in it", in White Box Requiem, the emotion comes "from totally inside it".<ref name=":0">Template:Cite news</ref>
In a review of White Box Requiem for In Music We Trust, Gary Gold writes, "[Jandek's] songs remain as starkly beautiful as a David Lynch opening shot, and the accompaniment (imagine handing your most ornery nine-year-old nephew a $29 guitar before locking him for three days in a windowless basement) remains as brutally poignant as ever."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>