Originally published in The Forest Scout:
Nobody needs to be a rebel without a cause in order to have spunk, but you still know it when you see it. Heck, you even look for it; for as long as music is commercialized, artists will depend on their music’s presentation as much as the music itself. If only it were as simple as The Album Cover — a growing demand for concerts and social media updates mandates that musicians not only grab their fans’ attention but justify why they deserve it.
And yet, for all the defining moments within a group’s career, some casual listeners want it both ways, shoving intensity and simplicity into the same cramped boat. A hotly anticipated double album must be rushed to the presses, even when you’ll only end up picking one track for your playlist. You’ll memorize the years of release dates, even when you can’t remember when you first listened to the stuff. Yet, in the most nitpicky of packages, the measure of a band’s widespread impact could boil down to its name; it must be graceful enough off the tongue to catch on, but it must also alter how people breathe the little assortment of words that used to be unkempt lines from a dictionary.
In either respect, that’s a low bar for Jonnycatland to hurdle; no one’s thought of all those words in the same sentence together, let alone the same word. It seems they’d much rather belong in a couple of clips from a Shel Silverstein poem that Frank Zappa would paste in his scrapbook. The band probably hasn’t thought too much about what the words dictate as a phrase either.
“We have a friend named John, and he has some amazing cats,” guitarist and drummer Landon Kerouac mentions, “like, the best looking cats in the world… and then Joe [Merkle], our guitarist, was just like, Jonnycatland.”
But there you go: they’ve got our attention — I’d say they’ve earned it. Spunk doesn’t have to be rocket science.
Though a spiritual twin to Chive (whose recent and phenomenal Winnie & Rue is a fantastic example of North Shore talent), Jonnycatland isn’t exactly in the backyard of LFHS; you may only know a fifth of the group, senior Kerouac, from your classes, and even he’s from Oak Park, along with vocalist and guitarist Merkle, bassist Gina Passaro, and keyboardist Ellie Traczyk (lead vocalist Max DiFrisco hails from Elmwood Park). Despite the fact that the quintet all met playing for their district’s branch of School of Rock — a beacon for young artists looking to explore their musical knack with equals in the area — Kerouac doesn’t mind you calling the band local, even if you’re stationed all the way over in Lake Bluff or Lake Forest.
It’s probably that geographical veil that might lead you to consider them mysterious and suave, even with their wide, extroverted grins spread across their Bandcamp site. The divide isn’t that intimidating, and neither are they. There’s already something democratic about what they do together that surpasses any hometown loyalties; they’re in the studio to enjoy the music as much as the listener, and they’ll take their time on it because they know it’ll make both the process and product more enjoyable. Jonnycatland wants neither intensity or simplicity; they simply want to break down a boundary that isn’t there. What if the Sharks and the Jets exchanged mix-tapes (and not through dance battles)? Wouldn’t that take guts, not to mention humility?
If there’s something to be said about that palpable relationship built off of music, the five high schoolers prefer showing it rather than talking about it. They’ve hit one big literal and metaphorical chord as Jonnycatland, and Warm Soup, the band’s debut EP, doesn’t have a hard time convincing you so — it’s to-the-point, low stakes, and thoroughly enjoyable. Does a little bit of influence appear from The Police? The Smashing Pumpkins? Real Estate? Yes, inspirations are there (all in good taste), but JCL brings a sample of their own character to the table as well. Made in four (four!!!) hours at BobDog studios in Oak Park — the costs for the single session were covered as a reward for Jonnycatland’s first place snag at a Battle of the Bands — Warm Soup feels like it has a shareable story behind its operation, sleek, smooth, fun, and one that we’re lucky to be there for.
The gleeful admiration for that oxymoron of “carefree intimacy” doesn’t feel anywhere more apparent on Warm Soup than on its opener, “Living Clean.” After a subdued bass line, the band soon emulates both the perfectionism of Jeff Buckley and the jittery, sporadic twitches of David Byrne to pull off a rather magnetic ode to reggae. It’s accessible as much as it is inverted, like seeing a sunny day at the beach through a kaleidoscope of mist. The pacing of the track pierces through the shade, musically and textually — the song hints at its own skeptical personality, put on edge by an intrusive atmosphere too pure and rudimentary for one’s own good. In an open concept, however, the band finds a guilty pleasure in getting lost in its current; their musicianship is propped behind direction, but their personal sights are invested in wherever the flow takes them.
Still, if you’re one for reading into little nuances, Jonnycatland’s got you covered; “Warm Air for Catalina” could be an allusion to the healing connotation of the album title. The tempo is upped and polished, forming a seeming paradox with the longing its narrator emphasizes (“I want to be somewhere, some place, someday / But I’m moving too slow always”). We’d call the lyrics derived — Merkle’s only turn at the lead vocals on Warm Soup is a channeled one, having written “Catalina” for his girlfriend all the way in Argentina (that’s across two different hemispheres, folks).
It’s a promising relationship, but one that, for obvious reasons, the listener can imagine to be difficult. Merkle doesn’t doubt it, nor does he abuse those emotions to fold a half-baked sob note; though each verse is built on not much more than a sparse four chords, the vocal deliveries successfully recall a confident dual romanticism, overlapping between a classical era and a modern one. “Overhead” seems like the continuation and release for “Catalina,” slowly blossoming into an appealing percussive splurge in the track’s production phase.
Warm Soup almost has too much momentum for it to close with “Perfect Time” (some strong irony there). Such are the fickle complications with EPs. Jonnycatland, however, has the instinct to anticipate the limitations of its recording, decelerating from “Overhead” to a soft, breezy bounce. DiFrisco speaks of “navigating empty sounds” — one would assume those to be of leisure rather than of indifference, but our navigator again feels as though his shortcomings are catching up to him (“Warm soup is all I need / think about it every time I speak”).
It’s curious, seeing that Jonnycatland seems to evoke more summer than winter. From a first impression, the group’s EP is bright but realistic, poppy but not overdone. Not to make it sound like the band has an agenda (they hardly seem to have one), but Warm Soup is simply likable bait. These four songs are communal in a lot of different ways; whether they offer an independent or festive listen, they provide just another valuable document to both the splendor of youth and the brink of its coming of age, simultaneously innocent and maturing. Even if the members of Jonnycatland are still looking for what makes them tick, they’ve proven that they’re willing to live up to the name — and we’re sure that we’ll watch them do it.
