The first album by former members of Pacific Northwest art-punk ex-bands Pretty Girls Make Graves and Blood Brothers succeeds wildly in sounding exactly how you think it would. First single "Highways of Gold"-- one of the best pure punk tracks of 2008-- feels like the product of Portland-based osmosis, triggering fond memories of Dig Me Out via ex-Brother Johnny Whitney's shape-shifting voice, which crosses over into Corin Tucker territory at several points during the song. From there, the band-- which includes Jay Clark from PGMG and Blood Brother Cody Votolato-- pastes all-ages club punk, pop metal, prog, and classic rock into an incandescent collage spiked with furious lyrical streams-of-consciousness. Like the Blood Brothers, Take Me to the Sea is united by Whitney's voice, impossible to ignore as it slides between seemingly any style that could be described using the verb "wail."
Whitney's words perfectly mirror his timbre, evoking a world of post-apocalyptic post-consumer waste from which-- evidenced by the album's title-- he desperately wants to escape. "Jaguar Pirates" is the best example of the album's prevailing themes; it's more or less a recruitment poster for the disaffected. Consider this call-to-arms dialogue: "Are you broke? 'Yes I'm broke!' Are you hungry? 'Yes I'm hungry!' Are you sleeping in a ditch filled with cellulite and concrete?" You get the point, but it's nonetheless hammered home: "Everyone take back the rad world. Join the jaguar pirates!" Sweet, where do I sign? On "Georgia", the thick organ lines and slower tempo is redolent of the blown-up R&B of the 1970s as much as At the Drive-In, with even a slight whiff of nostalgia threading through semi-clunker but still evocative lines like "We'll swim so far in that ocean crammed with shopping carts." A band like Chairlift sunk itself last year with a po-faced/nü age approach to this same sort of far-lefty anti-consumerism, but Jaguar's balls-out sensationalism makes it go down much easier.
Sea is histrionic, that can't be argued, but it's also sentimental in parts: both for an age without rampant consumption as the prevailing mode of existence, and, somewhat surprisingly, for family. The hard-charging acoustic anthem "Bats Over the Pacific Ocean" opens with Whitney bemoaning being evicted, and having all his shit strewn across his front lawn. As he picks through his stuff, finding old family pictures sends him on a hallucinatory trip through the past, reconnecting with his mother at age 17 and brother (stationed in Afghanistan) in some alternate-universe backyard barbeque. From this angle, though, nothing beats "The Man with the Plastic Suns": it's the moodiest song on the record, essentially a fable told by a son about his hard-luck gambler of a father. The title refers to a casino owner, and Whitney paints him as a nefarious overlord, "inventing diseases just for fun."
Getting to these themes, rewarding as they are, requires peeling back several layers of high-octane flash and overbearing pushes toward "revolution" (their official website is called takebacktheradworld.com, after all). It's understandable for some to stop at the positively Judas Priest overtones of "Vagabond Ballroom" and "Humans Evolve Into Skyscrapers", or even to kvetch at another record fed up enough with late capitalism to devote several songs to its impact on society. I can't say I'm immune from either of these reactions to Take Me to the Sea, but at the same time, I found myself more often than not getting swept up in the sheer intensity of Jaguar Love's approach.
