The young followers of the label 31G would have missed the boat on Jaks the first time around, but then again so did most of the old-timers.

I recall seeing clearance bins filled with 1994's Hollywood Blood Capsules (Choke) shortly after it came out, and I forced friends to purchase copies. I wondered how something so creepy and great was getting slept on when the West Coast gave love to like-minded but slicker acts like the VSS or Clikatat Ikatowi. It may just have been a case of bad timing. The Steve Albini-produced album stands the test of a decade, but it was an anachronistic beast even then, foisting its Birthday Party worship onto a Midwest hardcore scene that was just recovering from the first of emo's tear-soaked waves.

At the time, while most of the world homed in on Chicago's post-rock family, there was an active cluster of groups dabbling in darker source material. Count Trenchmouth, Scissor Girls, and Jaks were in that circle. The latter were perhaps the most invested in punk as a formal arena in which to work out their anxieties and goth shtick. Sean Antanaitis's jagged guitar scrapes swoop like vultures lunging at open brainpans. The scabrous rhythm section of Jessica Ruffins on bass and Shawn Gates on drums has a martial command that keeps songs within hardcore's constrictions. But Katrina Ford's voice is the real uncanny power on Here Lies the Body of Jaks – it's a guttural androgynous howl emerging from a rail-thin Shelley Duvall-esque figure obsessing over spiders and coffins while scratching chalkboards.

Given the paucity of information from those pre-message board days, all that can be gathered about Jaks from oral histories are snippets of trivia. They started life as an Ann Arbor, Mich., straight-edge band, which is documented on the Five-Nine 7-inch tracks included here. Ford supposedly kept her bandmates from wandering out into the Chicago daylight, adding to their vampirelike mystique. As artsy and elitist as they appeared, Ford befriended East Bay punkers Schlong and guested on that band's West Side Story tribute, Punk Side Story (Hopeless, 1995). They managed to tour the United States with drummer Bill Skibbe after Hollywood came out, but that was pretty much the end. Antanaitis and Ford begat Lovelife and most recently Birdland, while Ruffins and Skibbe played in Sea of Tombs and built the Keyclub recording studio.

Jaks tracks from the 1996 compilations CIA via UFO to Mercury (Atavistic) and 20 Bands Trash 20 Songs to Find the Way to Sesame Street (Bun Length) failed to make the cut on this reissue of Hollywood and the out-of-print singles. But I want to give this album a chance to work on fresh ears – it's hard to think of a band that does what they did, now or then. (George Chen)