This summer, Jenny Hval sang of "soft dick rock" on her incredible and unsettling Apocalypse, girl. She explained to Pitchfork that part of this idea—an inverse of hyper-masculine cock rock—stemmed from her watching the two-part, three-hour History of the Eagles documentary.
Like Hval, "Saturday Night Live" alumni Bill Hader and Fred Armisen found something to ponder with History of the Eagles. On a two-episode chunk of their new parody series "Documentary Now!", they paid tribute to the same expansive documentary that inspired Hval. But instead of the Eagles, Armisen and Hader focused on the fictitious Blue Jean Committee. What started out as fake has become fact with the Blue Jean Committee’s new EP, Catalina Breeze. The duo don't just lend their faces to the band: they wrote and recorded all these songs themselves, too—Armisen has a long history as a drummer, and is currently the bandleader on "The Late Show with Seth Myers", his "Documentary Now!" co-creator and "SNL" cohort.
Catalina Breeze barely passes the 10-minute mark through seven songs, but even in its brevity, Hader and Armisen manage to hit every hallmark of the California band they sought to be in "Documentary Now!". The opening title track offers the most complete portrait of the Blue Jean Committee: keys mix with bongos and a swishy percussion section, while the repeating chorus of "Catalina breeze, Catalina" is just as breezy as you’d hope. It feels so comfortable and familiar that, for a minute, it feels like it’s not just funny business after all. Later, "Gentle and Soft" arrives as a harmony-heavy acoustic ballad adorned with an occasional twinkling chime.
Elsewhere on Catalina Breeze, it feels like the Blue Jean Committee is trying to hit as many '70s songwriting themes as they can in as little time as possible. "Going Out to Hollywood" follows the trope of a narrative of a small-town diner waitress who’s got bigger dreams than her home can accommodate, while "Mr. Fix It" directly recalls ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" in its jumpy, earnest appeal to a powerful cosmic figure. The band throws the slightest bit of funk into the mix with "Mama You’re a Dancer", and "Walking Shoes" mimics the not-so-Southern rock peddled by the likes of the Doobie Brothers with a banjo hiding under peppy guitar licks.
All of this is enjoyable for music nerds, who get to pick out the embedded inspirations and influences. But ultimately Catalina Breeze is an impressive, if perhaps not entirely necessary, follow-through on a joke. It wasn’t enough for these songs to exist on TV; they had to get cut to vinyl and put out through Drag City, as well. Catalina Breeze makes for a fun exercise, but as a standalone release, it’s a little, well, soft.
