Music / The Amazing Jeckel Brothers

He is of your positively, he is of your love. Meet one half of the juggling duo, the Amazing Jake Jeckel.

The Amazing Jeckel Brothers is a 1999 album by the Hip-Hop act Insane Clown Posse, their last album of The '90s, their second album with Island Records, the first they recorded for the label, the first after Island's merger with Def Jam Recordings, and the fifth Joker's Card^note of the first deck of ICP's Concept Album cycle.

The Amazing Jeckel Brothers represent good and evil inside humans. They represent our conscience, as well as the weight that our actions will carry when the end finally arrives. Jake is the just and Jack is the sinister. They specialize in a juggling act in which the stakes are a person's immortal soul, with the balls representing the sins you've committed in life. Jake tries to juggle the balls between himself and his brother as best he can, while Jack tries to make him slip up by throwing him curveballs. If the brothers complete their act without Jake dropping a ball, the person goes to heaven, but if Jake drops even one ball, the person goes to hell.

The album was ICP's best selling album up to this point, debutiny and peaking at #4 on the Billboard 200. However, critics hated it, though less than their previous albums.

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Track listing

1. "Intro"
2. "Jake Jeckel"
3. "Bring It On"
4. "I Want My Shit"
5. "Bitches"
6. "Terrible"
7. "I Stab People"
8. "Another Love Song"
9. "Everybody Rize"
10. "Play with Me"
11. "Jack Jeckel"
12. "Fuck the World"
13. "The Shaggy Show" (featuring Snoop Dogg and Gangster Fun)
14. "Mad Professor"
15. "Assassins" (featuring The Jerky Boys) (Geto Boys cover)
16. "Echo Side" (featuring Twiztid)
17. "Nothing's Left"

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'Jack throws another trope, Jake catch one more, they'll try to catch alll tropes in store for you

• Arc Number: This album has 17 tracks
• Critical Dissonance: Despite peaking at #4 on the Billboard 200, critics hated it, although the reviews were better for this than The Great Milenko and Riddle Box. One of the odder things to ever appear in a review of one of their albums was when Stephen Thomas Erlewine, in a 4/5 review of this album, said that since The Amazing Jeckel Brothers is a Concept Album, it showed more ambition than ICP's previous albums, which Erlewine also reviewed, indicating that he'd listened to them, and yet somehow he didn't notice that all of ICP's albums are Concept Albums? And it's only this one that popped out to him as showing ambition, and not the whole "6 Joker's Cards" series of which this is the fifth^note of the first deck?
• Dark Is Not Evil: Jake looks almost exactly like his brother (an evil fire spirit/demon) but tries to save a persons soul by juggling their sins as best he can while his evil brother Jack tries to throw him curve balls and make him slip up.
• Epic Rocking: "Nothing's Left" is 6 minutes long, starting with a piano melody that builds into a rocking full band performance as J sings "on the day when the wagons come, I just pray that you let me on".
• New Sound Album: Compared to the Rap Rock approach of The Great Milenko, The Amazing Jeckel Brothers is more Hip-Hop oriented in it's sound, but it still exhibits a Rap Rock sound on tracks like "I Want My Shit", "Terrible", "Another Love Song", "Everybody Rize", "Fuck the World" and "Assassins".
• Palette Swap: The only major difference between Jake and Jack is that one is yellow with red flames and the other is red with yellow flames.
• Playing with Fire: They are often depicted doing this.
• Really 700 Years Old: At least according to "I Want My Shit." Given the liberties he takes with history, however, it's strongly implied that he's lying to get his shit.
• Sampled Up: "Another Love Song" was based on the instrumental structure of Beck's song "Jack-Ass", which Violent J loved and wanted to do his own Horrorcore take on. Upon trying to license a sample of "Jack-Ass" from Beck, ICP learned that Beck's song was entirely built around a sample of the Irish Blues Rock band Them^note best known for their song "Gloria"'s cover of the Bob Dylan song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". So ICP ended up clearing the sample from Dylan instead of Beck, because the music was actually Dylan's, not Beck's.
• Serious Business: The Amazing Jeckel Brothers decide the fate of your immortal soul with a juggling act, with every ball representing a sin you've committed in life. If you manage to see the whole thing, you ascend to heaven, but if Jake drops a ball before it's over, you go to hell.
• Slasher Smile: Well, one of them anyway...
• Special Guest: Ol' Dirty Bastard on "Bitches", Snoop Dogg and the Ska band Gangster Fun on "The Shaggy Show", The Jerky Boys on "Assassins" and Twiztid on "Echo Side"^note which was previously released as a single under the name Dark Lotus.
• Spiritual Successor: "Another Love Song" to "Love Song" off ICP's second album.
• What Could Have Been: Ice-T recorded a song with ICP called "Dead End" for this album. However, even though ICP loved the song, they didn't think it fit into the album's concept very well, so they decided to cut it. It ultimately wound up on a B-sides compilation called Psychopathics from Outer Space.

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