Weekly Release Spotlight: Jaguar Love

Posted on 9/14/2008

Jaguar Love

Take Me To The Sea

[Matador]

Despite amassing a cutthroat and ravenous fanbase throughout their successful ten-year run, Radio K never heavily playlisted vocalist Johnny Whitney and guitarist Cody Votolato's former cartoony post-hardcore outfit, The Blood Brothers. Additionally, as Jay Clark's Pretty Girls Make Graves moved from grit to gloss over the course of three albums, you might have heard less and less of them on the K airwaves. It thus came as an especially joyous case for unexpected celebration at our musical headquarters when these three artists came together to mix outlandish and raw pop and rock sensibilities for their new satisfying collaboration, Jaguar Love's debut album Take Me To The Sea.

Maturing just enough to embrace structured melody while still injecting unconventional instrumentation and vocal interplay, it is almost as easy to hear the roots from whence these band members originate as it is to be shocked by their newfound voice. Whitney's intense yelp (both into the mic and onto the keyboard) becomes more controlled yet it pierces with the same vehemence, Votolato's chops become more methodical yet the distortion screams at precisely timed explosive moments, and Clark - formerly PGMG's guitarist - stays frenetic on the drumkit without ever letting the tempo reel out of control. An incomprehensible balance of patience and passion was put into constructing these songs, making them that much more admirable.

And though this modus operandi is executed consistently without fail throughout the album's ten tracks, the trio also manages to vary its sound stylistically, never coming across as a one-trick punk-ish pony. Acoustic guitars and xylophones swim under "Bats Over the Pacific Ocean" without heading into ballad territory. "Georgia" gets closer with its hopeful down-tempo sway and piano chord stomp, but the richness in Whitney's wail alongside a driving frenzy of organ and overdrive in the subsequent "Vagabond Ballroom" remind us of the pure visceral charge Jaguar Love is capable of. Really though, it's mid-tempo numbers like "My Organ Sounds Like..." and "Highways of Gold" that stay stuck on repeat in jukeboxes both imaginary and real - both in your brain and on now, also on Radio K.

Written by Chris Polley, Radio K volunteer and host of Now Like Photographs.