Side-projects and offshoots are traditionally creative outlets which serve as reactions to and frivolous breathers from the Day Job, but Jacques, the alter ego of London's premier bedsit rock band Jack, are different. Where Jack are bedsit, Jacques are bedstand. Where Jack lever out the last remaining romance from the digital age, Jacques do the same thing, but in the process get even more detritus under their fingernails.
The chief difference between the two is that Jack feel like the saviours of Brit noir, while Jacques feel, intrinsically, like a captivatingly grubby diversion. Leader Anthony Reynolds does the Scott Walker thing, and quivers on the high notes in a way that Suede's Brett Anderson can only delude himself about, while the odd bit of violin and Will Johnson's Yamaha keyboard add highbrow-meets-everything-for-a-pound ambience. Stories are told evoking well-to-do-folks adrift in nothing-to-do places (This is What you Do), faded glamour (London Loves You) and glorious tat (To Stars).
Reynolds is one of those performers who seems to stalk the stage shadowed by his teenage self. He introduces a song "written when I was young and depressed" that starts with the line "Let's not talk about killing ourselves tonight", and you can see his previous incarnation haunting second-hand book shops in a big coat, consumed with self-loathing, the sort of troubled soul who probably found Morrissey a bit shallow and turned to Bergman, Brel and Kafka for solace.
But Reynolds' residual angst isn't a burden; it is actually an asset, something from which he seems to have emerged more confident, more self-deprecating (unlike Tindersticks' Stuart Staples, he's aware that he's a moody sod), with a clear-eyed view of the world. There's a touch of masochism about the whole thing - the sense of someone dreaming about glamourous surroundings from the discomfort of drab ones, but only because they can't be arsed to get off the public lavatory floor - and the squalid, existential, Bukowskian world that Jacques create is something which only exists, if at all, between the cracks of modern London. But you know that Reynolds must have done his research to make it sound this real.
