I guess this album came out late last year, so I was late on the uptake, but whatever. This is one of the catchiest albums I've heard in awhile. It's weird because Jaguar Love is simply a derivative of Pretty Girls Make Graves and The Blood Brothers, neither of which I really like. The only thing I really liked about The Blood Brothers was Johnny Whitney's voice, which has been likened to the sound a child makes when he is being tortured, but even then, it wore on me pretty fast. I'm just not really into hardcore stuff.
This however, is great. It's like, hmm... Rage Against the Machine's throttle meets Built to Spill's knack for melodies, and they get married and have a son, and Geddy Lee and Robert Plant somehow artificially inseminate a woman and have a daughter, and these two kids get hitched and start a band after listening to a ton of Cat Power and The Mars Volta. Which sounds fucking awful, but trust me, it's good. It's amazing how musical Whitney's voice can be, as seen on "Jaguar Pirates" and "Humans Evolve Into Skyscrapers," and yet most of the time it's superfluous, because the rest of the ensemble is so tight that there's no dead space; in the spots where albums traditionally tend to meander aimlessly, these guys just insert another hook. Although they don't really sound similar, I was reminded of the first time I listened to Yeasayer's All Hour Cymbals, because of how surprisingly original they sound, when, at the heart of it, they're not really breaking any new ground. It's simply a songwriting frenzy. And the production is top notch, which is a rarity for a lot of sideshow bands these days.
Highlights: "Georgia," "Jaguar Pirates," "Humans Evolve Into Skyscrapers," "The Man With the Plastic Suns."
