The instrumental interlude that starts off “Like Cold Rain Kills a Summer Day” is something that I would never recommend a band to do. The minute of instrumental opening feels like eons whenever an act does it. Start from a 0 level, but don’t let a few minutes go by before kicking into the disc. Still, even with this early black mark against the band, Janez Detd is able to…
Janeska sings in a style that has manifested itself through much of dance culture, outwardly sounding like Jennifer Lopez and Gwen Stefani. To couch tracks like “On Your Knees” as anything besides feel-good music would be mis-contextualize Janeska. While “Moonlight” uses a much slower tempo for its backing beat, the same pop-pandering style is put forth by Janeska. Here might be a hint of techno present in the track, but…
Individuals who have any access to outside musical sources (whether they be popular radio or music video stations) have at least some idea who Jane’s Addiction were. Practically any discussion about the nineties will have a section about the band (or their biggest hit, “Been Caught Stealing”) due to the effect that the band has had on individuals and bands both contemporary and current. The fact that there had not…
Transcendent of any musical genre, Jane’s sophomore release begins with “Never Thought It Was Love”, a country meets Sheryl Crow-type of romp, which moves into the much more electronically-infused “Place To Find You”. Instead of overdoing it with the synthesizer lines in the aforementioned track, Jane is able to chart eirself as a more sedate alternative to Madonna. “Place To Find You” is a more sedate, nineties-themed dance track. The…
Coming off as a less Christian Crystal Lewis, Jane performs a very innocuous type of pop music that owes more to The Carpenters and Shania Twain than Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. While Jane does play acoustic guitar, another ten people join into the mix, but each individual (at least those who play instruments) sounds more like a program function of Cakewalk than an actual human being. Take the five-minute…
To be honest, it took me a few minutes to truly get into the type of music that Jaks played. By the time that the track “Damn Bloodsucker” started up, I knew that I would be a fan of their dance-noise style. The ever-present bass lines (which provide a groove all their own) and the Primus-like arrangement of “Dumbwaiter” show a band that liked to experiment with the boundaries of…
The Jai-Alai Savant’s “Thunderstatement” gives listeners the same general feeling as if they happened on a seventies rock band’s album that has been lost for the last thirty or so years. During tracks like “Scarlett Johansson, Why Don’t You Love Me”, the band’s music really comes forth as if it was born directly from the arena rock era. The band moves up a few years to the Police-sounding title-track. Where…
I thought when “Banned In America” started that Jade would be creating something that was an Avril clone. Don’t get me wrong, the vocal style of Jade is still something that is pop-based, but the backing instrumentation is something that is much more heavy and rock-based. This puts Jade in the position of being another Amy lee. The vocal style gives me more of a Celine Dion feel, so the…
“I Am The Light” starts off in a much different vein than the following tracks would indicate. This is because “Jaxbac” is a purely vocal track that rivals (but does not emulate) throat-singing, while both “Blood Doesn’t Lie” and “Nowhere To Land” approach the industrial, early-nineties goth sound without abandon. The music on tracks like “I Am The Light” seem to be drawn from the Middle Eastern tradition of music,…
Aside from the wonderful new-plastic smell of the CD booklet, Ivy’s Butterfly strikes me at the beginning of their CD for another reason : the rich layering of vocals and the guitars unafraid to be both explorative and to rock out. Ivy’s Butterfly also provides me with a slight problem, as with Go Rimbaud, the sheer work they do on each track renders it virtually impossible to assign a generally-acceptable…
