Album review: Jaguar Love - Take Me To The Sea

With a Seattle pedigree and a major independent label behind them, Jaguar Love promise much. That Take Me To The Sea singularly fails to deliver is even more disappointing when the lyrics look so fascinating. This isn’t boy-meets-girl or boy-meets-boy, this definitely isn’t ‘lick my love pump’ or ‘Satan-worshipping chained murderer’, and it isn’t tales-of-downtrodden-working-men, either. This is like Hemingway short stories masquerading as lyrics passed through a surreal blender; the album title is the most prosaic thing about the whole album.

The cover is over-stylised and fussy, but the CD booklet accompanying Take Me To The Sea is a sketchbook dream with hand-typed words and scratchy writing illustrated by black and white pencil drawings of class. Someone in Jaguar Love is either an art major or a product of design school.

Jaguar Love are a classic three piece with no extraneous flab to their musical muscle: Johnny Whitney sings like a castrated cat on helium; Cody Votolato plays a kind of schizophrenic Japanese jazz/metal guitar mush over the top, characterised by a harsh tinniness and an overloaded amp; Jay Clark drums as if he’s listening to his band mates practising in another room and can’t quite stay on the beat.

Astonishingly, Jaguar Love supported Queens Of The Stone Age in America - I fail to see what either band has in common with the other, except that they both play instruments. Odd is not the word; I’d be fascinated to see what a live audience would make of Jaguar Love’s wailing jazz thrash that features a singer singing as if his pubes are on fire.

There’s a slab of old (and past it) grunge at the core of Take Me To The Sea, welded to a Gary Glitter-esque glam stomp. But the aimless yet highly coordinated backing tracks are ruined by the presence of a singer who screeches, wails and vocally gesticulates without once finding either a new tune or a single memorable melody.

I like music that requires attention, several plays, an intelligent mind or a certain atmosphere to understand it. But having given Jaguar Love (and, particularly, Johnny Whitney’s vocals) the time of day for several listens of their début album I can say categorically that this is music to torture terrorists with. No-one is staying silent while this ghastly cacophony is on.

I suspect that, somewhere, there’s an A&R man sitting with his head in his hands thinking “this isn’t the Jaguar band I signed…” and only realising later that he got the wrong group to put their names to the dotted line. Take Me To The Sea is a waste of studio time, a waste of technician’s time and - God help me - an utter waste of my time. I want those hours back, y’know.

Terrible shame about Jaguar Love’s noise: the words looked wonderful. I’d rather have skewers put in my ears than listen to Take Me To The Sea again, though.

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