Album: Take Me To The Sea
Artist: Jaguar Love
Genre: Indie Rock/Art Punk
Year: 2008
Label: Matador
[Note: I wrote this well before Hologram Jams was released. I plan on doing a follow up piece to this one where I review Hologram Jams. In the mean time, please excuse the speculative ending, I meant to publish this a while ago but got sidetracked. Still. Enjoy!]
The Blood Brothers were the best Seattle band to ever be mis-labeled as Screamo, and that inaccurate description of them annoys me to no end. Just because a band has screamed vocals does not make them a Screamo band. The distinction is that a Screamo band is effectively just an Emo band that screams the words instead of singing them. Both genres are pretentious, insincere and, thankfully, seem to be waning in popularity, at least from where I’m standing anyways.
Back to the point.
The Blood Brothers were not a Screamo band but an arty Post-Hardcore band with screamers for vocalists. Note that last part. The Blood Brothers were blessed with two excellent screamers, Jordan Blilie (the whiny one) and Johnny Whitney (the super whiny one.)
In 2007, The Blood Brothers announced to the world that they were calling it quits, but all of the members of the band have continued forward in music. Actually, all of them still play with each other, but they’ve split the camp down the middle. The two bands that have risen from the ashes, Past Lives (formed by Jordan Blilie, Mark Gajadhar, Devin Welch & Morgan Henderson) and Jaguar Love (formed by Johnny Whitney, Cody Votolato and Jay Clark of Pretty Girls Make Graves,) each feature one of The Blood Brothers two voices and each band sounds distinctly different from the group that spawned them and each other. I plan on talking about both of these bands in time, but for now I’d like to start out with Jaguar Love as their only album thus far, Take Me To The Sea, has been in heavy rotation over the last few days.
The Blood Brothers final album, Young Machetes, aside from being their best, featured a song called “Laser Life” which I feel pointed in the direction of Jaguar Love’s first album, Take Me To The Sea. Like most of The Blood Brothers music, the song was an aggressive screamer but it was also the most Indie sounding and possibly poppiest song on the album, featuring a bouncy keyboard driven sound and hooky vocal lines. Take Me To The Sea, instead of sounding directly derivative of The Blood Brothers usual music, takes on a much more Indie Rock feel, shedding the jagged guitars and unrelenting aggression in favor of cleaner, less spiky guitars and an overall sound that is far more hook laden than The Blood Brothers ever were. Furthermore, the rage that seemed to propel The Blood Brothers music is essentially gone. But thankfully, none of this spells bad news for Jaguar Love’s sound.
The fury may not be there, but the hectic energy remains and Johnny Whitney, Cody Votolato and Jay Clark put it to fantastic use as each track on this album brims with dynamic vigor. Though Clark may have played the majority of the instruments on the album and produced it as well, this is without a doubt Whitney and Votolato’s show. The two… err… “blood brothers” take lead positions on vocals and guitar, respectively, and both prove that they haven’t lost anything since leaving The Blood Brothers. Whitney’s possessed vocals are at the heart of the fiery music and he makes the most of no longer having to share stage or vocal time with Jordan Blilie. Someone once described Whitney’s voice as sounding like “Perry Farrell after a sex change” which is similar to what I thought, that he sounds like Perry Farrell if his balls never dropped. His voice is definitely not for everyone and will be the thing that scares some people away from Jaguar Love’s music, which is a shame.
Whitney doesn’t have a classically “good” singing voice, but he’s mostly dropped the harsher elements of the war cry he used with The Blood Brothers and makes far more effort to actually sing a lot of the songs, rather than just screaming them. His falsetto is something to marvel at, but his lyrics are the real draw. The Blood Brothers always had surrealistic lyrics and it’s nice to see that Whitney hasn’t lost his proclivity for abstractionist turns of phrase. It is also nice to see the expansion of sound that started on Young Machetes continue in Jaguar Love’s music. In addition to some excellent electric guitar and drum work, Take Me To the Sea features washes of Wurlitzer organs, occasional string sections and even a marimba and acoustic guitars on “Bats Over The Pacific Ocean” which is one of the best songs on the album and also one that best differentiates Jaguar Love’s sound from both The Blood Brothers and Past Lives.
My favorite songs on the album are straight rockers though. “Jaguar Pirates” begins with a rolling intro that then erupts into a bombastic, hook loaded fist-pumper that features some of Whitney’s most… well… jaguar-like screeches. Another great one is the organ drenched “Georgia” in which Whitney gives crooning a try, and it works out pretty well. But by far my favorite song on the album is “Humans Evolve Into Skyscrapers” which begins misleadingly with programmed drum beats before Votolato’s lightning charged guitar rips in, quickly followed by Whitney’s adrenalin rushed vocals. The song is an anthem and may not feature Whitney’s most inspired chorus in “everybody, get the fuck out, everything is so fucked up now” before screaming “mass exodus! Black streets bleached black” at the top of his voice, but the rest of lyrics in the song convey his usual surrealistic bent. I don’t really know what the song is about, but I like it and the chorus features my favorite vocal hook of anything on the album.
With Take Me To The Sea, Jaguar Love proved their worth and that they’re more than just The Blood Brothers-light. The album had great sound, lyrics and execution but we’re unlikely to ever hear it live. Here’s why: for reasons I don’t know, Jay Clark left the band and Whitney and Votolato decided to continue on as a duo, playing to a drum machine. They also declared that they would only ever play three songs from the album “Highways Of Gold,” “Bats Over The Pacific Ocean” and “Jaguar Pirates” and that they had gone so far as to completely re-work them for the new setup. The new Jaguar Love material moves far away from the Indie Rock direction of their first album and into more dancy-electroclash territory. Having heard the first single from their forthcoming second album, I’m not sure what to think of this. It’s good, but it’s not better than Take Me To The Sea. But one single doesn’t always spell doom for an entire album and who knows? Maybe Jaguar Love will do the move to Electroclash correctly and it’ll be like if the Yeah Yeah Yeahs had produced a good album with It’s Blitz. We’ll have to wait and see.
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