“AWW LISTEN TO MY HEAR SLAM IT”S A HOLOGRAM JAM!”
That, a line from “Cherry Soda”, comes really goddamn close to summing up the entire album. In fact, another line from the same song (“Sugar-coated cherry soda pukin’ on the lawn/it’s six A.M. the party’s over everybody’s gone) basically provides the rest of the equation. I had high hopes for this shit. Johnny Whitney was my favorite part of the Blood Brothers (I promise this is not a Blood Brothers blog), with his unabashedly flamboyant, toy-aisle-tantrum hair-curling yowl-fest voice. Luckily, the voice still plays, but Jesus. This album is so over the top it’s like auditory neon. Granted, I got into that Past Lives record first, but even that can’t make the lack of subtlety any less glaring.
Jaguar Love’s first album, Take Me to the Sea, played things a little safer, going for a standard guitar/drums/Johnny Whitney/maybe some keyboards formula. It was pretty sweet. They had J. Clark, the drummer from Pretty Girls Make Graves, which was pretty sweet, and it was a little less abrasive than Young Machetes without being totally fucking lame, which was pretty sweet, and then they came out with Hologram Jams last week, which, in theory, was pretty sweet. “I Started a Fire”, the first track, is pretty sweet, and in fact EXTREMELY catchy, in a similar way that Andrew W.K.’s “Party Hard” was extremely catchy. But by the time the second song hits, you can already tell that there isn’t going to be a lot of depth here. For one thing, it’s called “Polaroids and Red Wine”. Come on. That’s like the Fisher-Price My-First-Hipster kit. Still, it’s catchy as hell and has this dance/face-melt thing going on. And then comes “Cherry Soda” which plays more to the face-melt than it does to the dance, which is awesome…
And then you’re basically out of good songs. The rest of them are the same day-glo punch in the face, with Whitney screeching exuberance at you (see “Everything is Awesome”) and sounding like he’s about seventeen years old. You start to miss the drummer, real bad, because the drum machine cranks out machine-gun obviousness. And he was from Pretty Girls Make Graves.
Maybe it isn’t fair that I listened to the Past Lives record first. To be honest, I fully expected to be obsessed with this one, but I can’t deny the fact that Past Lives have matured (but not in a boring, growing-up, impotent way) and Jaguar Love have regressed, with the Blood Brothers being the reference point. Tapestry of Webs seriously took me on a ride the first time, and it was fucking awesome, and I’ve been going back for more ever since. Hologram Jams showed the goods on the first round, and shot its wad in the process.
That’s basically all I’ve got. There are only two more things that need to be noted:
1. I will move on from talking/writing about the Blood Brothers now.
2. The last song on the album is a FUCKING JANIS JOPLIN COVER. At first, it was worth a lot of points in the category of HAHAHAHAHA WHAT THE FUCK?! After 3 seconds, it was completely unlistenable, misguided, regrettable, embarrassing, and abrasive (in a bad way).
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