Even with a critical eye, I find myself continuously and pleasantly surprised by Oak Park’s Jonnycatland. It’s true that the band’s been prepared for college radio even before its members graduated from high school, but I’ve been wrong to view them excessively through the black-and-white context of adolescence/maturity. They are young, but so what? They are now sufficiently animated to garner more than something. They are accomplished; they represent someone, somewhere, sometime.
There must come a palpable moment for an aspiring band when a truer form of loyalty arises from its fans; simple listeners chatter about a couple of songs just to avoid sinking into the crowd at a party, while the dedicated ones pop one of the band’s tapes into the stereo on the silent ride home, deep into the heart of the night. Jonnycatland have earned the former, and they have simply gotten there ahead of when most musicians do.
All Good Friends, their debut album, isn’t an introduction, but in case you still need one, the honors belonged to their impressive EP Warm Soup. With this entry, we immediately picked up on the group’s three most winning traits: (1) they were appealing (though their name rightfully suggests that they’re inventive, they are less the offspring of 60s’ psychedelia than of witty generational charmers like John Hughes and Judd Apatow), (2) they were accessible (“Living Clean” and “Perfect Time” sound like what they sound like), and (3) they were consistent.
All Good Friends challenges Jonnycatland to uphold the third credit (and perhaps to tinker with the second as well). They do a good job of doing so, not by inventing their own musical formula but by tapping into one that they know already works. Their influences, artfully present in Warm Soup, are carried over to All Good Friends; Mac DeMarco’s retro shoegaze; Guided By Voices’ 90s’-era garage flavor; here in particular, believe it or not, is Sonic Youth’s cloudy freeform. These are assorted choices, but smart ones nevertheless. All Good Friends serves as a cohesive umbrella, stirring these names together rather than walking a careful tightrope between them. For now, they are studious; the new album is an insight into not so much who they are but what they can do.
New in this LP is a colorful array of instrumental interludes, ranging from fun noodling to, quite frankly, majestic songwriting. Perhaps I’m oversimplifying, but I’ve long considered the neo-folk fallout of Fleet Foxes to have exhausted the thin label of “banjo-ocean mix.” In “Briar Patch,” the dreamy opener for All Good Friends and a fine model of musicianship, you will find the genre invigorated and lifelike again. The song is brief, but it neither replicates nor wanders during its runtime. It lends perfect spacial awareness and care to each of its intricately moving parts. Without these concise but reflective pieces, which are often the most enthralling of the album, the epic, cymbal-crashing climax of “Spirit Talk” would appear out of the blue. Most everywhere else on the album, the tracks are grounded and know what and where they are; the more pop-friendly ones snap into a tempo and dynamic early on, without much of a desire to stray far from home. They land their fun on the first listen, and the top tier examples retain it for the second and onward (see the stealthy “Wait For Me” and the crisp “Where Do I Go From Here”).
Those who enjoy basic playlist material will decide what they think of the nine-minute spectacle of “Spirit Talk,” the most Jonnycatland has ever experimented in terms of structure or length. For me, the band takes advantage of the album format; during their time of adjustment, they’ve focused not only on providing a flow from song to song but also on leaving clues in between. Bruce Springsteen is oft quoted as having said of Bob Dylan’s monumental “Like a Rolling Stone” that the song “sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind.” Consider the soft harmony of “Gracie in Her Basket” to be the polite knock before “Spirit Talk.”
I don’t believe that Jonnycatland’s literary work, however, can be read like poetry quite yet. The lyrics, while far from empty, strain to clasp the rhyme over the reason at points. The narrative avatar commonly deals with the apparent loss of an intimate partner, but “Key West,” while gorgeously produced, induces a conflicting lull for the beach. Does the band feel that they’re losing time or have too much of it? Still, as always, they’re vocally assuring. Max DiFrisco pulls and accentuates the words to his seductive liking; he’s a damn good singer.
While All Good Friends was only recently released on iTunes and Spotify this past Friday, the five members have made the album available on their Bandcamp site since mid-June. Do yourself a favor and run through the album on Spotify (or just plain buy it) if you haven’t already. Bandcamp’s just a bit clunky as a listening service — I found this out during my first analysis — and it doesn’t provide what should be a fluid experience with All Good Friends. Sleekness and haziness are lightly tugged apart to form two separate entities here (where they were kneaded together in Warm Soup), but the dissection isn’t a violent one as much as it is an inquisitive, self-guided tour around what faces the band can potentially wear.
The word that Warm Soup brought to me was “confidence”; Jonnycatland — at least modestly — know their strengths. It seems ironic that the bare, pensive nature of “Its Gotta Be Real” beckons the word “more.” I imagine the song to encapsulate a visual, a moving picture frame. The viewer faces the sand and the sea ahead of them. As the guitar strings twang and resonate, the viewer’s perspective moves not toward the coast but, curiously, backward into the jungle, branches and leaves slowly consuming the frame itself.
The listener notices that there is more to be seen and heard, and the group probably wants it already. This is no shortcoming. Acknowledging “more” is success; “more” is purpose. It’s “enough” that’s the dangerous word; “enough” is a dead end. Ha! When will Jonnycatland ever settle for that?
