London Camden Dingwalls
It takes a while for their candle-rockin' nature to shine through.
Scrawny effects-pedal disciple Mark Greaney may not have been to Mass for a long while, but it looks like he's found a surrogate activity. We are gathered tonight to commune with the unholy/holy serrations of the fastest-rising Irish three-piece on the planet and it takes a while for their candle-rockin' nature to shine through.
It's hot as molten wax in the dripping venue, but post-teens Greaney, drummer Fergal Matthews and bassist Hillary Woods are extra-cold-stout cool onstage. The boys hide behind generic stickmen appearances. Even in a glittery top, Hillary is as remote as a Venusian android. With film cameras zooming in and a knot of newly converted fans pushing forward, they spasm into action with the exuberant dischord of 'Long Way South'.
The clangour is just right. Buoyancy levels are pneumatic. The explanation for the easy ascendancy of the JJs is, however, somewhat slow to unfold. Perturbed abstract poetry flung into the air in a burred falsetto can be a fine thing, but it's hardly the new frontier. Neither are dirty guitar tunings that seem to have been sampled from intermissions on Sonic Youth records and stop-start song structures ripped from a tour guide to Seattle.
'Snow' strums forth elegantly before erupting into raging power-chord intensity, but it's slightly too much by the book. 'Surrender' successfully approximates a mood shift from dream state to waking beneath an avalanche of partially fermented mixed fruit. All of this is good in a right-side-of-wallowing, hummable glum-assault way, but the parameters aren't quite being blown wide open as with early sightings of your Verves or your Manics.
So why the fuss? Just as you've got them down as the sound of late Graham Coxon, plus the singer from Geneva and a pin-up ice-bassist, JJ72 open up and let you in on some secrets. After the teen anthem 'Oxygen', Greaney delivers a solo acoustic version of 'Desertion'. Unstrained and alone, he sounds, well, magnificent, bending his upper register with Jeff Buckley-like skill, stopping time in its tracks for three minutes.
At a point when the plague of indie men singing in high voices definitely requires no further recruits, Greaney brings something genuinely worth hearing. This is not 'bloke who can do Radiohead well enough for jobbing producer with string section'. This is the real Lonely Choirboy deal and it's done well enough to ignite fanciful thoughts about JJ72. If Greaney is Bad Chorister, his chief delight appears to be glazing up a stained-glass window of virtue and then lobbing a brass candelabra through it. 'October Swimmer' holds back on the sonics, arcing with the trajectory of a Smiths anthem, but the conviction moments come at the end, when they cut loose from any affiliation with the nice-tune ethics of Travis and Coldplay and engage properly with the dirty delights of unreasonable noise.
'Algeria' erupts into a vicious bout of guitar-strangling. 'Bumble Bee' moves from darkness into incandescence and heads for the feedback-fundamentalists' hills, Greaney screaming in a manner guaranteed to give his nodules nodules. Our noisenik chorister might prefer to downplay the effects of years in a Jesuit school in Dublin (not to mention post-bunnycide trauma from the evisceration of his pet rabbits by pagan hoodlums), but it's hard not to imagine some kind of a purity/defilement, innocence/horror tension at the bleeding heart of JJ72.
The service ends with the singer ritualistically smashing his guitar and holding out the broken, tortured neck for the outstretched hands in the crowd. A contrived gesture, maybe, but by then they've already won the right to make some theatrical moves.
In their ability to be serious without being dour; in their noncommunicative hauteur; in their skinny, twitching feverishness; their ability to out-swoop the also-ran swooping bands; their possession of the year's sexiest teen-girl-with-guitar and their scarily confident psycho-cherub-voiced singer, they have the lineaments of a potentially special band. It came together in the end - purple-hazed epiphanies, sonic guilt and all.
It's hot as molten wax in the dripping venue, but post-teens Greaney, drummer Fergal Matthews and bassist Hillary Woods are extra-cold-stout cool onstage. The boys hide behind generic stickmen appearances. Even in a glittery top, Hillary is as remote as a Venusian android. With film cameras zooming in and a knot of newly converted fans pushing forward, they spasm into action with the exuberant dischord of 'Long Way South'.
The clangour is just right. Buoyancy levels are pneumatic. The explanation for the easy ascendancy of the JJs is, however, somewhat slow to unfold. Perturbed abstract poetry flung into the air in a burred falsetto can be a fine thing, but it's hardly the new frontier. Neither are dirty guitar tunings that seem to have been sampled from intermissions on Sonic Youth records and stop-start song structures ripped from a tour guide to Seattle.
'Snow' strums forth elegantly before erupting into raging power-chord intensity, but it's slightly too much by the book. 'Surrender' successfully approximates a mood shift from dream state to waking beneath an avalanche of partially fermented mixed fruit. All of this is good in a right-side-of-wallowing, hummable glum-assault way, but the parameters aren't quite being blown wide open as with early sightings of your Verves or your Manics.
So why the fuss? Just as you've got them down as the sound of late Graham Coxon, plus the singer from Geneva and a pin-up ice-bassist, JJ72 open up and let you in on some secrets. After the teen anthem 'Oxygen', Greaney delivers a solo acoustic version of 'Desertion'. Unstrained and alone, he sounds, well, magnificent, bending his upper register with Jeff Buckley-like skill, stopping time in its tracks for three minutes.
At a point when the plague of indie men singing in high voices definitely requires no further recruits, Greaney brings something genuinely worth hearing. This is not 'bloke who can do Radiohead well enough for jobbing producer with string section'. This is the real Lonely Choirboy deal and it's done well enough to ignite fanciful thoughts about JJ72. If Greaney is Bad Chorister, his chief delight appears to be glazing up a stained-glass window of virtue and then lobbing a brass candelabra through it. 'October Swimmer' holds back on the sonics, arcing with the trajectory of a Smiths anthem, but the conviction moments come at the end, when they cut loose from any affiliation with the nice-tune ethics of Travis and Coldplay and engage properly with the dirty delights of unreasonable noise.
'Algeria' erupts into a vicious bout of guitar-strangling. 'Bumble Bee' moves from darkness into incandescence and heads for the feedback-fundamentalists' hills, Greaney screaming in a manner guaranteed to give his nodules nodules. Our noisenik chorister might prefer to downplay the effects of years in a Jesuit school in Dublin (not to mention post-bunnycide trauma from the evisceration of his pet rabbits by pagan hoodlums), but it's hard not to imagine some kind of a purity/defilement, innocence/horror tension at the bleeding heart of JJ72.
The service ends with the singer ritualistically smashing his guitar and holding out the broken, tortured neck for the outstretched hands in the crowd. A contrived gesture, maybe, but by then they've already won the right to make some theatrical moves.
In their ability to be serious without being dour; in their noncommunicative hauteur; in their skinny, twitching feverishness; their ability to out-swoop the also-ran swooping bands; their possession of the year's sexiest teen-girl-with-guitar and their scarily confident psycho-cherub-voiced singer, they have the lineaments of a potentially special band. It came together in the end - purple-hazed epiphanies, sonic guilt and all.
JJ72 to split
JJ72 : I To SkyNME Alerts
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