On “I Wish I Knew,” the fourth track on his full-length debut, Olden Goldies, Juan Zaballa shows that he can capture the speed and spunk of classic Ramones on an acoustic guitar. In no uncertain terms, his rhythms and vocal melodies telegraph from where Zaballa draws his influence. Just in case, though, the Buenos Aires-via-Far Rockaway singer/songwriter name-drops the legendary Forest Hills punks when he sings about “Sharing good times with you/Listening to Ramones.”
As anyone who loves the Ramones can tell you, their music captures a powerful sense of nostalgia and by-gone innocence. Zaballa discovered the band at the ripe old age of 8, so it isn’t surprising that they have such a strong hold on him. Eight of the 15 songs on Olden Goldies are built on Johnny and Tommy Ramone’s signature groove, as Zaballa does his best Joey Ramone impression over top of them. Zaballa also favors a similarly naive mode of expressing himself. “I Wish I Knew,” for example, could be a love story straight out of the “Happy Days” era. “I know you like fruits, amusement parks too/And staying up all night,” Zaballa sings to his lost (presumably high school) sweetheart. On “Far Rockaway,” he references the subway ride to to the Queens neighborhood the Ramones immortalized on “Rockaway Beach.”
But Zaballa knows he has to do more than simply cop the tone and style of his glue-sniffing, cretin-hopping heroes. He laces several of his riffs with off-color, borderline jazzy chords that would certainly have made Johnny Ramone wrinkle his nose in disapproval. Ironically enough, Zaballa breathes new life into lo-fi pioneer R. Stevie Moore’s introvert anthem “I Like to Stay Home,” by giving it a Ramones makeover and cutting it down to 43 seconds.
Half of Olden Goldies is clearly indebted to the Ramones, and the other half shows Zaballa indulging his taste for garage psych. He accents most of his Joey Ramone-styled verses with a mic-distorting bark that suggests a bridge between the album’s two primary modes. But the song sequence alternates haphazardly between them, making for a disjointed listen. And Zaballa doesn’t follow-through on what could have been fruitful side detours: the ambient Rhodes-like piano swell at the end of “Another Juan,” for example. When Zaballa does veer off the path, such as on the cloud-like guitar-keyboard loop at the base of “Kaya” (a loving ode to his smoking substance of choice), it only highlights how much more variety he has up his sleeve.
By Zaballa’s own admission, Mac DeMarco didn’t actually “produce” this album in the traditional sense, and it shows. Worse, the lack of production makes for a strangely colorless tribute to the rock’n’roll era. It’s odd to say about a pompadoured, rockabilly wildman who alternates between English and Spanish, but Zaballa’s records could use more of his own character.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Mac DeMarco engineered the album.
