Jaguar Love

Take Me To The Sea

[4.5/5]

The end of both the Blood Brothers and Pretty Girls Make Graves in 2007 marked two fairly significant losses for fans of super-smart, super-loud post-hardcore. Proving that some kind of mythic, cosmic balancing force may, in fact, exist, the heavens have now bestowed on us lowly humans this powerfully awesome record to get stoked on. Featuring Blood Brothers Johnny Whitney (vocals/piano) and Cody Votolato (guitar/bass) alongside PGMG alum Jay Clark (drums/bass/keyboards), Jaguar Love actually do sound like a somewhat logical amalgam of both bands. “Highways Of Gold” opens with Whitney’s trademark (insanely high-pitched) vocals before Votolato and Clark drop in with a groove that mixes the high-octane intensity of the Bloods’ Burn, Piano Island, Burn with a tight-as-shit rhythm that would probably sound equally at home on the first Franz Ferdinand record. The energetic mash-up of styles continues throughout as the band explore classic-rock melodies on “Georgia” and ’50s rockabilly with “My Organ Sounds Like…”. That none of these songs actually sound like the genres they steal from is what makes Take Me To The Sea such a powerful record; it’s the sound of three musicians playing to their strengths while challenging their songwriting style, resulting in a cohesive listen that holds your attention to the end. (MATADOR) Sam Sutherland

ROCKS LIKE

At The Drive-In’s in/CASINO/OUT

Hot Hot Heat’s Make Up The Breakdown

Q And Not U’s No Kill No Beep Beep

IN-STORE SESSION WITH VOCALIST JOHNNY WHITNEY

Were there particular influences you were trying to draw out with this band that you couldn’t before?

Basically, the Blood Brothers were us trying to play pop music through the lens of metal and hardcore. And with this band, that preconceived stylistic notion is just null, and we’re free to just write whatever kind of music we want. We’re fans of all different kinds of music, from the Sex Pistols to Elton John to David Bowie to Ghostface [Killah]. We didn’t get together and say, "Let’s sound like this band," it was just, "Let’s be a band." The influences of all the music we listen to comes through because we don’t have to revert back to being a punk-rock band. We can be whatever we want. And that was one of the reasons why we wanted to get the Blood Brothers disbanded.

By the end of the Blood Brothers, did you feel like you always had to go back to sounding like the Blood Brothers?

That was a constant struggle. We started the band when we were in our teens and were all into local punk and hardcore. Fast-forward seven years, and our tastes have expanded but there’s always this archetype you have to go back to. That was a big struggle.

So does being in a new band release those pressures, or does it just create new ones?

It does both. Any time you’re "ex-members of blah blah blah," people will always reference what you’re doing with what you did. But with the songwriting process, it was just gravy. It was so much fun just hanging out and writing music, in a way I hadn’t experienced in a long time. I hadn’t really had fun writing music for four years before we wrote this record.

Were you able to translate that atmosphere from writing to the actual recording?

This was recorded by Jay and performed by just the three of us. We were trapped in a room for two months doing everything ourselves, pulling 16-hour days. But Jay had recorded four songs for us a month into us being a band at my house, and it just ended up sounding so good that we thought we should just do it ourselves; have complete control. And I think it worked out. I mean, we’re all super, super close. We warm up with "Bats Over The Pacific Ocean" acoustic before we go on every night. We hang out; we eat together; we drink together. There’s camaraderie. That was really the reason we started this. [SS]