Jellyfish

Here's a band that didn't last long enough for anyone to really know anything about them.  Since they only put out two albums before they died a quiet, sad death, I figured I'd just cover 'em both for ya.
     When I was in college way back in the 90's <gasp>, we had this video jukebox in the cafeteria.  Mostly it would just rotate the same few songs over and over and over again, but every once and awhile someone would have the balls to actually go over and pick a tune that once completed would reset the jukebox back to the same old same old.  Anyway, the tune that I used to pick most often was Three Little Pigs by Green Jelly (Green Jellö before they got sued by Kraft), but one of the tunes in the rotation was The King Is Half-Undressed by Jellyfish.  I could never figure out if I dug the song or not simply because I could never get past their wardrobe: I mean look at it!  I was a huge fan of all things 60's/70's, but this is everything I despise - a cartoonish, sort of Cat-In-The-Hat version of Flower Power that's just all bad.  And considering the video was getting played in 1993/1994 when flannel shirts, torn jeans and grunge was the thing to do this was like the local Wicca coven/Renaissance Fair folks had kids with some rich Berkeley hippies and those kids started a power pop band.  Bad, bad wardrobe choice, guys.
     Anyway, over the years I kept hearing about how great this band Jellyfish was, and all I knew about them was their style choice, so I shrugged them off.  My buddy Scott kept bugging me about it, and finally one day while trolling the Information Superhighway I decided to check them out.  I had no idea how badly this band would suck my life away for a couple months.  Freakin' ridiculous...  I became completely obsessed and had to get everything they ever put out, which is luckily only the two previously mentioned albums and a four disc box set.
     The first album is Bellybutton, the cover of which is posted above.  With the pipe organ intro of The Man I Used To Be it becomes quickly apparent that this band is NOT the love child of the Wiccan/Ren Fair/Berkeley-ites, but is actually spawned from a hedonistic orgy of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Queen and Cheap Trick.  These guys LOVE pop music, and while they most definitely wear their influences on their sleeves proudly, I never feel like they are simply the sum of these influences.  As much as I dig Lenny Kravitz (and I do; I have hard copies of his first 6 albums and the rest digitally), I feel like he is simply re-writing classic Hendrix/Sly Stone/Zeppelin tunes.  Jellyfish feels more like they're taking bits and pieces of tunes from each band and squeezing them through some sort of musical pasta press.
    I love The Man I Used To Be.  It's beautiful and sad and gorgeously orchestrated.  That Is Why is a great pop tune with an incredibly catchy chorus.  That's the thing with this band: every songs starts out so-so, but then the chorus comes in with some ridiculously catchy melody that'll be stuck in my head for the next 3 days.  The King Is Half-Undressed is masterful... ripping off the drum beat from The Beatles Tomorrow Never Knows and putting it behind a ripping guitar and a bit of harpsichord thrown in for good measure.  I Wanna Stay Home is a sweet ballad with a Bacharach-made "french horn" (more likely a cheap synth) part.  She Still Loves Him is a mid-tempo number that isn't terribly memorable, but All I Want Is Everything is all Cheap Trick, through-and-through.  Eat your heart out, Rick Neilsen.  Now She Knows She's Wrong is nice and bouncy, and Bedspring Kiss is one part I'll Follow The Sun, two parts Girl From Ipanema with a bit of sitar in the background for good measure.  The last couple of songs are solid pop numbers well, but the REAL masterpiece is in Jellyfish's second album:

     Right from note one we know that this is something different.  A bit of dreamy chimes and strings, then they smack you across the face with harmonies straight from Brian Wilson's brain, with a light dusting of Freddy Mercury over the top.  Hush is beautiful if a bit derivative, but it blasts straight into Joining A Fan Club, which is easily one of the best songs these guys have written.  Fantastic lyrics, epic production, and truly masterful songwriting.  To use a standard reviewer colloquialism, if Bellybutton was the appetizer, Spilt Milk is most defiantly the main course.  Following Joining A Fan Club's brilliance is Sebrina, Paste And Plato, a quaint little ditty reminiscent of Paul McCartney's For No One complete with ticky-tack piano.  New Mistake is a gorgeous 6/8 epic with a great Supertramp-ish Wurlitzer electric piano in the bridge.  I love the use of the castanets, and how the bass and the Wurly double each other.  Glutton Of Sympathy is really pretty, although the chorus sometimes sounds like a rewrite of That Is Why.
     The Ghost At Number One is tied with Joining A Fan Club for the best song award.  Another bit of pop magnificence and the harpsichord makes it's return, used to even greater effect here.  If you don't walk away singing "How does it feel?" then there's something wrong with you.  Nothing on the rest of the album reaches the same high point as Ghost, but it's still a great ride.  Bye Bye Bye is bouncy pop that will again get stuck in your head for weeks.  All Is Forgiven is rocky, but it never really catches fire for me, and Russian Hill is pretty but not memorable.  He's My Best Friend is a funny little ode to a penis, Too Much, Too Little, Too Late is one I usually skip and Brighter Day is actually the prefect way to end both a masterful album and a career, as it were.
     Jellyfish began in the early 90's with drummer/singer Andy Sturmer and keyboardist/vocalist Roger Manning in Pleasanton, CA.  They never seemed to gain too much ground in the alterna-grunge era, and between that and the frustration of studio egos and lineup changes they disintegrated after just the two albums.  And don't get me wrong: even though I blew off a few of the tunes in the review above, I really can listen to each album in full and never truly feel like there's any dead weight.  These albums are far too fantastic to have been ignored.  Anyway, there was enough of a desire from the fan base that eventually they put out Fan Club, a four disc set that includes full demos of every song on these two albums plus a ton of unreleased tunes and live performances.  Check out this live acoustic version of Joining A Fan Club.  Yes, they pull off all those complicated harmonies live!  If you dig these albums and need more of a Jellyfish fix, see if you can find a copy of Fan Club.
   Until next time, underwater friends.

Jabbering Trout - Swell

NOTE:  I was unable to find a place online that streamed this album, and I was uncomfortable uploading it somewhere without permission.  The links included all go to the Internet Archive where there's a live recording of the CD release performance.  I've noted the track number after each link.  Any song without a link wasn't played at the show.

Here's another choice cut lifted from the discard bin at WNHU, West Haven.  Honestly, most of the CDs in the bin were crap, but sometimes you can find a diamond buried in the... um... stuff.

I can hardly find any information about Jabbering Trout.  After scouring the Internet for a few days, here's basically what I came up with:  Jabbering Trout consisted of two main members, Tom Burris on guitar, harmonica and vocals and Dylan Callahan on drums and backup vocals.  Burris basically writes all the material.  He was a New Yorker turned Bostonian that wanted to be a writer but ended up doing the singer/songwriter thing instead.  He played solo for a bit, then formed Jabbering Trout for two self-released albums, got disillusioned and went back to solo performing, changed his mind and reformed the Trout, then pretty much vanished from the scene.  From what I can gather, Swell is the second of the two releases.

First off, this album has one of the worst album covers in the history of music.  I'm not truly sure what the statement here is, but WOW, that's just awful.  Seriously.  This definitely makes a great case for the idea that no matter how good the music is, you've got to get the listener's attention first.  I love this album to death now, and it got my attention for sure, but I have to say that this doesn't make for a good first impression, so let's just skip that and get right to the content.

As soon as What You Got [track 2] starts, it's obvious that this is a unique band.  The gunshot of the snare drum, the angular groove, the off-kilter chord progression... and then his voice.  It took me a few listens to figure out if I dug this or not, but I just couldn't stop listening to it.  It's so oddly captivating, and I'm not sure why it all works together but it just does.  Burris' voice is a strange baritone; strange in the same way as that Crash Test Dummies dude is, but far more listenable.  Somehow the harmonies are made to work, and then there's a truly beautiful chorus.  How does no one know about this band?

Touch It [track 22] starts out a little more standard, but then blasts into another off kilter chord progression.  There isn't anything musically incorrect here, just wonderfully non-standard.  And again with the snare drum... how is it that it works and isn't obnoxious?  The more I listen to this album, the more I dig it's weirdness.

From here on out we get into more standard singer/songwriter fare.  War Between The Sexes [track 4] has this great singable melody, and a bit of Somewhere Over The Rainbow in the break for good measure.  Tumble On [track 6] has a lighter touch and Callahan goes brushes, so we get a break from the snare for a bit.  Babydoll, The Beauty Queen's [track 20] best moment is "You're everything a boy could want, and smart too!"  Nice.

Now we land on Pregnancy Tester [track 14].  The intro is fantastic, especially his pronunciation of urine as ur-eye-n.  The delivery is sufficiently droll as well, and the rest just takes care of itself.

Left Unsaid [track 9] brings us back to the singer/songwriter plate, and Summer [track 17] is Callahan's sole entry as a composer.  It's appropriately happy and upbeat, as you would expect any song named Summer to be.  Damn Fantastic [track 7] is another great happy song.  Somehow Burris manages to take a topic which has been covered over and over to death and still make it his own.

My favorite track on the whole disc is Lost And Gone [track 5].  The harmonies off the top are bizarre and brilliant, the story is gorgeous, the melody is incredibly singable... damn fantastic, if I do say so myself.  I get wrapped up in the song and have to stop myself from starting it again at the top once it's done.  Really great.... I dunno what else to say.

The record rounds out with After Saturday [track 13], a nicely obligatory closing ballad.  A pretty song, but I'm pretty done after I shot my wad on Lost And Gone.  It's really the only way to close out the whole experience.

So there you have it: Jabbering Trout.  At first I was turned off by the monotony of Callahan's snare, but then it became one of the things I dig about this album's simple production.  Burris' voice is so unique and he handles it well, and he is a great storyteller.  He's one of those guys that can create a very clear picture of a scenario or a moment, akin to Ben Folds or Paul McCartney.  I first heard the name when I used to troll rec.music.phish (newsgroups: remember those?) and after finding the disc in the throw-away bin, I never heard or found anything else from them.  Tom Burris has a website (TomBurris.com) but it's frustratingly lacking info or music.  The same is true of his MySpace page, which has a mere four tracks on it.  What happened to this guy?  Was he another casualty of the music industry?  I feel that way about myself often, so as curious as it might be for an artist so unique, it's understandable.

Tom, if you're out there, this album kicks ass.  I want more.