Jade Tree, 2001
Please excuse my hyperbole, but the split up of Cap’n Jazz in 1995 was the worst thing that has ever happened to modern music. You might surely be snapping your heads back in wild amazement, or asking, “Who?” but so long as we agree that I’m correct now, we can save ourselves a bit of time. Cap’n Jazz only released one album—Schmap’n Schmazz*—and later an anthology, and it’s a damn shame. Because, you see, they were the second wave of emo—after the initial hardcore scene and before today’s dilution of the term—and one can only speculate that if they’d stuck around a little longer, got a bit more well known, well, we might not just have to suffer guyliner. Let’s be clear, while many people would vomit all over a My Chemical Romance CD (and argue it improved the sound), I personally don’t care about their success or not—no-one’s pouring it into my ears, after all. But guyliner is awful. And seriously, you have to apply it to the waterline, not just daub it around your sockets so you look like a WWF charity case. C’mon.
Clearly, someone else told this to the band, and so we got Owls. The original line-up of Cap’n Jazz (brothers Tim Kinsella and Mike Kinsella [on vocals and drums, respectively], along with guitarist Victor Villareal and bassist Sam Zurick) are all present and correct. But that’s not to say this is just a reunion, because while Tim’s screeching voice still floats over the instrumentation, that’s the only readily-identifiable mark of Cap’n Jazz’s ghost on the album.
That little metaphor there wasn’t just for giggles. The word ghost might be extreme, but in many ways this album is like a grandad. Not your grandad, the senile pensioner who has to be spoon-fed, or your grandad, the old war veteran who’s convinced you’re a fag, but your grandad, you: the one who tells rambling and incoherent stories about breaking into Southend Football Club and drinking the kegs dry, and gives you £1 after he’s done. And sure, it’s only a quid, but bless him, he tried.
This album is a mess from the word go: you get the odd feeling that a dim-witted naturist was sent to cover footage of owls, and after a series of convoluted mistakes ended up stalking the members of Owls. Hilarity ensued. Each part of the music—the vocals, the guitar, the bass, the drums—could have easily been recorded separately and then slapped together in the studio by a savant audio mixer, who then promptly disappeared from the world leaving only a pair of soiled Airwalks. It’s a wonderfully discordant collision of sounds and lyrics that probably causes faux-musique scholars to spit out their quills and moan about the lack of form and structure and then months later start prattling on about Serialism, because if you’re gonna suck the fun out of music you might as well go the whole hog.
If there was one song that represented this album, it would be middle track Everyone Is My Friend. The drums explode onto the song seconds before an indifferent guitar riff plays to the side, like it wasn’t even bothered about doing this anyway, gawwwd. Tim Kinsella howls over it, unbelieving of the concept of harmonies, and sings lyrics so long-winded and completely isolated from each other that you begin to suspect he’s singing in senyru’s, each one perfectly describing teenage life:
I know it must
be rough, you’re so much smarter
than your friends.
and screaming over the line I’VE BEEN INVENTING YOU, AND CONTINUE INVENTING YOU, a line like a hundred others on the album sounds like it could mean something but fuck it, we’ve got a song to play here and there’s no time for that introspective shit. The bass chugs along the whole time, as if it’s completely unaware of the soul-searching that’s apparently going on, a jumbled guitar riff sounds out, apparently stumbling in lost from another song. And then, it doesn’t even have the decency to finish properly, the song just stopping like the sound recorder passed out from a whisky-induced coma, vomiting all over the controls. It’s amazing.
If you’ll allow me another tortured metaphor, and you will because you like them secretly, it’s a lot like strawberry cheesecake. I mean, you know the biscuits go with the cheese, you know the cream goes with the strawberries, and to an extent you can understand why the biscuit tastes nice with the strawberries as well. But why, why, why, does the cheese go with the strawberry? You’d never eat them together normally, and yet here you are: apparently perfectly sane and eating cheese with strawberries. And in a similar fashion, you can tell the vocals go with the guitar, the guitar lays nicely over the bass, and the bass ties in well with the drums. But there’s some logical disconnect between the drums and the vocals that never quite fixes itself, leaving you with a feeling that something is wrong, but godammit, it’s cheesecake, and cheesecake tastes delicious.
In summary, if you like cheesecake, you’ll like this. If you don’t like cheesecake, well, no-one wanted your opinion anyway.
1/0
*AKA: Burritos, Inspiration Point, Fork Balloon Sports, Cards in the Spokes, Automatic Biographies, Kites, Kung Fu, Trophies, Banana Peels We’ve Slipped on and Egg Shells We’ve Tippy Toed Over
Reviewed by David
Track List
1. What Whorse You Wrote Id On
2. Anyone Can Have A Good Time
3. I Want The Quiet Moments of a Party Girl
4. Everyone Is My Friend
5. I Want The Blindingly Cute To Confide In Me
6. For Nate’s Brother Whose Name I Never Knew or Can’t Remember
7. Life in the Hair Salon-Themed Bar on the Island
8. Holy Fucking Ghost
Download
