Jaguar Love - Take Me To The Sea

Jaguar Love are made up from ex-members of Blood Brothers and Pretty Girls Make Graves, and they’ve produced an album that comes at you from all angles in what is a painful battering. It’s an awful album of grating sounds, probably about as awful as how I’ll feel when it’s my funeral and I’m watching all the frauds and professional mourners turn up to eat the pork pie halves, whilst my loved ones are left with the breadsticks. At times the vocals sound like Marc Bolan after he’s binged on blue Smarties and Ribena, and they seem unable to pin down their sound, instead doing a bit of glam/art punk/avant-garde/bad metal and not really doing any of them well. The lack of melody is only reinforced with the nails down blackboard vocals which make most of the songs on the album unbearable after a minute or so. Lead singer Johnny Whitney manages to somehow encapsulate the worst qualities of the sounds of a whining child, a yappy dog and breaking glass to form some sort of vocal scalpel that jabs at your ear repeatedly until you have to switch off. There’s just far too much going on for me and none of it is very enjoyable, from the mid-90’s alternative sound of Highways of Gold, to the Iron Maiden-esque intro of Vagabond Ballroom and the 80’s pop vibe of My Organ Sounds Like..., Jaguar Love seem to be very confused about what they are meant to sound like. It’s not good.

0.5/5


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