Jaguar Love
Take Me to the Sea
Matador
By Jose Fritz
The headphone jack on my laptop is going out. The problem is intermittent. I can lose the left or the right, or both, or toggle between. Before I diagnosed the problem it added a certain magical something to this album. All changes are accompanied by the static burst generated by the 100 ohm, 3.5mm plug shunting 50 millivolts to ground. It made a glitchy remix of the indigenous starts, stops, squeals and abrupt changes. It reminded me first and foremost that Jaguar Love contained Cody Votolato and Johnny Whitney, two glitchy, abrupt, and squealing members of the Blood Brothers.
There are certain things we expect from any Blood Brother, past, present or future. They howl like trapped animals and ferociously attack their instruments in the pursuit of the death of each song. Jaguar Love is somewhat less fierce. Votolato and Whitney brought with them the vices and virtues of the Blood Brothers. The vocals still resemble the pained death screeches of rabbits, but the melodies herein are somehow sweet. But don’t get the wrong idea. There’s not a Jackie Wilson among them, no “Tale of Woe,” and no pandering white blues, no commercialized soul jams on this disc.
Jay Clark made a lion tamer of himself. His multi-instrumentalist structural streak somewhat contained the Greg Ginn-like spastic impulses of Whitney and Votolato. Their career-long prog-rock tendencies mesh perfectly with the keyboard lines Clark's shoplifted directly from his time in Pretty Girls Make Graves. The balance is delicate; too much sensibility could betray everything they’d already accomplished and spurn a decade of loyal fans.
We who are not as others dare not chance the intimacies that would threaten to undermine our raison d'etre. They don’t undo anything great they’ve ever done. Jaguar Love betrays nothing. They build and expound upon that great base the Blood Brothers built.
The question is: how did they get here? Taming a wild animal requires compromise. Bring the wolves into the house, accept that they will piss in the corners, gnaw on the furniture, soil the bed sheets and devour the smaller, less nimble house pets. Jay Clark laid out raw meat and splayed carcasses in the Mount Baker National Forest to coax them out and eventually to trap them. The transition was difficult, but eventually with snare poles and electric shocks Johnny Whitney and Cody Votolato moved into Seattle’s Two Sticks Studio. The rest as they say… is history.
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