For those of a certain age, liking the kind of music Jaill make-- alternately classified as power-pop or jangle-pop-- was once a golden ticket to coolness, if you got in with the right crowd. The sort of self-consciously smart guitar music, which started leaking from college towns and working-class cities in the wake of punk, was positioned directly against the stuff coming from the power centers of New York, L.A., or London, championed as the product of local scenes. Whiffs of classic rock largesse commingled amidst minor British-invasion nods, all presented in an unapologetically geeky manner, appealing to those for whom record stores were the primary sites to accumulate cultural capital.
Traps is Jaill's third album and their second on Sub Pop. It mingles the barely contained frustrations of OG wimp-rockers (and fellow Milwaukeeans) Violent Femmes with a hearty Midwestern fondness for riffs and boss solos, while replacing that trio's anti-folk underpinings with a bit of swagger from power-pop godheads the dB's. The result is idiosyncratic pop-rock appealing to geeky outsiders and scene lifers that's perennially in short supply, largely by design: Too much of this stuff would eliminate its need to exist in the first place.
In other words, if everyone's hip, then no one's hip. If you've heard of Jaill before reading this review, it's likely because of their infectious, strutting 2010 single that picked apart the paradox of social striving. Two years later, that perspective has changed a bit, perhaps soured with age. To wit: "Everyone's a Bitch", Traps' anti-anthem outfitted with janky Cheap Trick riffs, which Vinnie Kircher elbows past to announce: "Everyone's a bitch tonight. I must admit that I've been feeling like I want to die." Traps is filled with acidic observations of this stripe, driven home by Kircher's pinched vocal. At various points on the album, his delivery resembles not only the barely restrained teen libido of the Femmes' Gordon Gano, but a classic rock bard of a different order: Dan Bejar, particularly circa Streethawk: A Seduction. There's little theatrical ambiguity here, though. The focus is more on the simple struggle of going out Thursday night because it's better than staying home, then sitting in the corner and waiting for someone to cross the imaginary lines you've drawn. Setting traps.
Low expectations are self-fulfilling prophecies, after all, and to Jaill's credit, they know that with rock'n'roll you can air them out. The best and prettiest songs on this album, "Horrible Things (Make Pretty Songs)" and "While You Reload", by all appearances draw productive lessons from the well-plowed ground of the breakup song. There's always a bright side, no matter how dim, and Kircher opens the latter song by admitting that he "gave myself a good grade on barely losing my shit." There's plenty of regret embedded throughout Traps, but not much wallowing. Kircher sings of wasting a lot of things, but time, it's clear, doesn't have to be one of them.
