Search - Daniel Johnston :: Yip Jump Music

Yip/Jump Music is the most personal album you'll ever hear

clock@tiac.net | Manhattan, New York | 10/31/1998

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Yip/Jump Music, the first accessible album from Daniel Johnston, is wonderful and sublime. It may make you sad or really happy or make your skin crawl--probably all three. But you won't be able to quit listening. Never have I heard an album that was so glorious, tragic, spiritual and funny at the same time."

Purity, beauty and truth

D. Stewart | Glasgow, Scotland United Kingdom | 10/04/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This record is the perfect antidote to endless releases high in production values but with no content and all humanity drained out of them, if they had any to start with. Johnston, in my opnion, is the finest songwriting talent of the last two decades.
One of the few artists I can think of comparing him with is adult child genius Brian Wilson, Beach Boy and creator of Teenage Symphonies to God. Like Wilson, Johnston is remarkable in that he combines a childlike purity and spirit with an instinctive and incredible musical gift. Their is a strong link between Johnston's best work and Wilson's 2nd great masterpiece
The Beach Boys Love You (the first being Pet Sounds). Like Love You this is a masterwork of primitive pop that's not nearly as primitive as it first appears.
Picasso supposedly claimed that by his teens he was able to draw like the most compitent adult and then said he'd spent the rest of his artistic life striving to be able to draw like a child again. Johnston and Wilson are two examples of artists who
never lost their child like purity in their work. In Johnston's songs it can be both wonderful and unsettling...This is music filled to the brim with PURITY, BEAUTY and TRUTH.
Some will find the very basic nature of these home recordings too much for their tastes but their are not many contemporary pop songs as brilliant or individual as Museum of Love, Worried Shoes and Speeding Motorcycle (all found here)... and King Kong, one of Yip Jump Music's most left-field entries, is a song that no one who ever hears it will be able to forget. In recent years Daniel has been taken under the wing and given support from well meaning producers and musicians. Many of the results have been really lovely but there is something uniquely magical about this period of his work.
Please take a chance and invest in Daniel at his most brilliant and extreme."