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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Jaguar Love - 2008 Take Me To The Sea

Band : Jaguar Love

Album : Jaguar Love EP

Release Year : 2008

Genre : Post-Hardcore / Indie / Artcore / Experimental

Tracklist :

1. Highways of Gold
2. Bats Over the Pacific Ocean
3. Jaguar Pirates
4. Georgia
5. Vagabond Ballroom
6. Humans Evolves into Skyscrapers
7. Antoine and Birdskull
8. Bonetrees and a Broken Heart
9. The Man With the Plastic Suns
10. My Organ Sounds Like...
 

The Blood Brothers died way too early. After just five albums, the last of which was arguably the high point of their career, the band just fell apart. From this, we have two new projects, both not surprisingly fronted by one of the two vocalists found in the Blood Brothers; Past Lives featuring Jordan Blilie (and pretty much the rest of the Blood Brothers, minus a recent guitarist and plus an original guitarist), and Jaguar Love featuring Johnny Whitney and the guitarist as of the end of the band, Cody Votolato. With the addition of Jay Clark, Jaguar Love would flesh out its lineup and has now released its debut LP, Take Me to the Sea. What is there to say about this new endeavor? Well…mostly that it’s a bunch of unlistenable crap.

What Take Me to the Sea proves is that a unique, ever changing and technically proficient album can actually end up being really bad. It’s not bad in the sense its unredeemable, just in the sense that it fails to do what it wants to really, really hard. It’s not homogeneous in the fact that every song sounds the same, but that pretty much every song ends up doing the same things. It’s not disappointing in the sense we were all expecting something brilliant, but in the sense that we all thought that a pop album made by dudes from the Blood Brothers would at least be cool to listen to. And while it might be cute for a play through, it is unfortunately nothing to get excited about. 

 

 

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Jaguar Love - 2008 Jaguar Love EP

Band : Jaguar Love

Album : Jaguar Love EP

Release Year : 2008

Genre : Post-Hardcore / Indie / Artcore / Experimental

Tracklist :

1. Highways of Gold

2. My Organ Sounds Like....

3. Videotape Seascape

 

Jaguar Love is one of two bands that have sprung out of the 2007 break-up of experimental hardcore band The Blood Brothers.

So here are Jaguar Love, making up two of the aforementioned Blood Brothers; Cody Votolato on guitars, and Johnny Whitney on vocals, along with J Clark (previously of Pretty Girls Make Graves) on percussion, Due to unforeseen differences, Jay Clark has left the band.

On evidence of the three tracks on this wee sampler Jaguar Love have retained a lot of the energy that made the Blood Bros so vitriolic, and don’t sound too dissimilar. To be expected. The guitars are less broken though, and Whitneys high pitched wails have license to roam, alone, as they please, rather than being the schizophrenic partner of Jordan Blilie. Jaguar Love are more pop orientated, but the carnivalesque style remains. The diverse elements they bring together; the eerie Japanese breakdown in ‘Videotape Seascape’, the oddball hooks on ‘Highways of Gold’, wouldn’t be done by anyone else. You are drawn in by the fact that it sounds like nothing else.
Jaguar Love have taken the crazed world of The Blood Brothers and distilled it into some great noisey pop. A neat intro to what will surely be a great debut album. Well chick this out.

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