LA’s Jangus Kangus Share “Double Lives” in Advance of LP

Fortune Cookie is the first wide-scale, above-ground release from Jangus Kangus, LA’s foremost purveyor of imagist garage surf– raw, witty, tuneful, quasi-punk, defiantly indie – and the going concern of Jasmine Sankaran, musician, songwriter, and creative dictatress. With a fierce mind and a fearlessly vulnerable soul, Sankaran is so adept at casting herself as the villain in her own stories that she renders herself a heroine for our times.

With influences ranging from the surly urgency of The Clash to the immersive introspection of Courtney Barnett and Sharon Van Etten, Jangus Kangus is an encyclopedic songbook of popular music and a bonanza of broken hearts, raw nerves, and prickly, jangly, playfully eclectic guitar-pop.

The densely and lovingly packed Fortune Cookie is an eight-song, 30-minute album recorded at Moosecat Recording, where Sankaran and her bandmates captured the intimacy of their live performances while pushing her songwriting and execution to new, unique heights, depths, and eerie liminal spaces.

This LP marks a significant leap forward from Sankaran’s previous scrappy DIY releases. Her band is at its most robust yet, with Steph Anderson (keys/backing vocals), Antonio White (lead guitar/backing vocals), Dan Perdomo (drums), and Ryan Kellis (bass) matching her intensity, intelligence, and commitment. Because nothing happens in a vacuum – at least, nothing good does – her songs are given fresh infusions of oxygen from producer Mike Post, who helped shape the album into a cohesive, dynamic, self-contained manifesto, provocation, and keepsake.

Even as she curses herself in song, Sankaran revels in her artistic progress, kicking around tempos and genre conventions, creating carefully tailored and fittingly complex arrangements, and sharing cryptic, cathartic, compelling confessions honoring the Pinteresque push-pull of relationships between people too smart for their own good.

“You Only Love Me When” is a deceptively lackadaisical country/western-adjacent lamentation for a toxic polycule of broken people and powerfully addictive substances. The rest of the record’s first half consists of the same sort of bittersweet bon-bons spiked with razorblades.

At the halfway point, the crunchy desert rock stomper “Janakita” kicks in to keep the energy up. The sparklingly complex post-everything love story “Honeymooners in Venice” and the intricate, shape-shifting “Goldilocks” invoke collaborations between St. Vincent’s Annie Clark and The Smiths’ Johnny Marr. And the operatic swag and wild wordplay of “High Rise” leaves you ready for the next helping.

It’s been a long, soulful, cerebral trip for Jasmine Sankaran from her home in Moorpark, California, glued to the oldies station in her mom’s car… to booking shows with the likes of Chase Petra, Hana Vu, Holy Wars, Biblioteka, and Guppy… to the remarkable artistic breakthrough of Fortune Cookiea title chosen as something that sounds cosmopolitan while in fact being 100% Californian).

While she’s happy, she wouldn’t say she didn’t see it coming. As she puts it, “I may make questionable decisions, but I don’t make mistakes.” While her characters may be hopeless, her songwriting and performances are pixel-perfect and poised for a very vulnerable sort of world domination.

The yard stack
Fortune Cookie
Hand Salad Records
April 11, 2025