Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Jaguar Love - 2010 Hologram Jams


Band : Jaguar Love
Album : Hologram Jams
Release Year : 2010
Genre : Post-Hardcore / Indie / Artcore / Experimental

Tracklist :
01. I Started A Fire
02. Polaroids and Red Wine
03. Cherry Soda
04. Don’t Die Alone
05. Up All Night
06. Jaguar Warriors
07. Everything Is Awesome
08. Evaline
09. Sad Parade
10. A Prostitute An Angel
11. Freak Out
12. Piece of My Heart (Cover) (Bonus Track)

Destroying the promise of 2008’s Take Me to the Sea, Jaguar Love’s new album abandons rock conventions altogether and invests in a synthesized mèlange of stilted party jams, stream-of-conscious rants, and the occasional mid-tempo attempt at pathos. The resulting cacophony may just represent one of the most flagrant wrong turns in recent music history.
After the demise of The Blood Brothers, Johnny Whitney took his high-pitched scream and formed Jaguar Love with Pretty Girls Make Graves alumni Cody Votolato and Jay Clark. Initially the new band focused on mixing the precision rock of Queens of the Stone Age with the expansive jazz chops of Mars Volta, an uncanny combination, but definitely more organic than their latest effort, Hologram Jams. In February of last year, when drummer Clark left the band, Whitney and Votolato turned to their laptops in an effort to replace their missing rhythm section. Absent Clark’s exact playing, the duo’s sound tilts toward a ham-fisted brand of electronica that misappropriates Dan Deacon’s hyper beats and fuses them with the absurdist tendencies of Mr. Bungle.

Unfortunately, two good songs do little to temper the overall disappointment with this new direction, and having thoroughly enjoyed Take Me to the Sea, it really pains me to denigrate its successor. In retrospect, Whitney and Votolato might have found it more prudent to ax about half of the other songs and offer this as an exploratory EP. That would have bought them some time to find a new drummer and let the proper follow-up gestate a bit more.


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