via//chicago

np: "Georgia" - Jaguar Love

Right now I should be listening to one of the several albums I have to review, but I just can't get past this particular song at the moment. This is seriously the best Elton John ballad that indie rock has ever given us. I'm not talking the Disney-fied ballads of latter day Elton, but the classic piano man ballad narratives. Your "Tiny Dancer", your "Levon", your "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters". Just replace the piano with organ, crank up the guitars, and voila! You've got "Georgia". The lyrics are a tad more bleak than the fare Captain Fantasic and Mr. Taupin used to crank out, but lines like "we'll I've been here before, where the waterfalls decompose, and symphonies go blind in the desert, so grab a microphone put the tape in press record, Georgia can you hear my heart explode?" are no less evocative. It's a great song on an unexpectedly thrilling album.

A little background for the uninitiated. Jaguar Love is the band that resulted from the sad implosion of two of my favorite Seattle area bands to emerge in the latter half of the 1990s - The Blood Brothers and Pretty Girls Make Graves. The Blood Brothers dealt in spastic post-hardcore that resulted in chaotic albums like ...Burn, Piano Island, Burn and Crimes; while Pretty Girls Make Graves traded in a more delicate, thoughtful version of post-punk that got them labeled everything from emo to art punk. Their 2003 album The New Romance made my Top 10 for that year and deservedly so, it was a beautiful album. The 2006 follow-up, Elan Vital, failed to live up to my expectations but I was gutted nonetheless to hear they disbanded.

I didn't follow up on the former members' comings and goings in the intervening months, so it wasn't until I read a press release from Matador that I knew Jaguar Love even existed. Even then I didn't get around to actually hearing them until I picked up their debut full-length, Take Me to the Sea. The Blood Brothers/PGMG connection had me intrigued, but I honestly had no idea what to expect given the divergent tastes and detours of the former bands. What I didn't expect, however, was a fairly traditional take on pop and rock songwriting. Sure, Johnny Whitney's vocals ensure that this won't accidentally end up next to Coldplay and Feist on the Starbucks shelves, but this stuff is pretty straightforward and suprisingly tuneful. There are still a few dissonant guitar stabs here and some head-turning twists of phrase courtesy of Whitney, but this stuff isn't exactly Merzbow meets Black Flag.

Can you tell I'm having a hard time working out just how to describe this album? Because I am. I just know that it immediately grabbed me on first listen and I keep returning to it over and over again. First and foremost to witness the majesty of "Georgia" again, but really, there isn't a bum track on the whole disc.
Give a listen for yourselves. Then go buy the album.

Jaguar Love - "Georgia" (taken from Take Me to the Sea)
Jaguar Love - "Bone Trees and a Broken Heart" (taken from Take Me to the Sea)