There's been no shortage of endearingly sloppy, blues-inflected garage rock in recent years, but Brattleboro, Vt.'s Happy Jawbone Family Band uses the template to create its own mythical world. Since 2009, the band has remained blissfully off-grid, recording hundreds of songs over several tapes and full-lengths for similarly homegrown labels like Spooky Town Artifacts, Feeding Tube, and Night People, which makes their next release feel like a move into the spotlight: it's being recorded with Jarvis Taverniere of Woods, and is set for release on Mexican Summer later this year. For context, the label is prepping for the forthcoming LP with this retrospective compilation, which might seem premature if the songs weren't so strong.
The collection opens with "Now Everybody Rock Like You Got AIDS", a track from their 2009 album Family Matters-- one of two 40-track cassettes they released that year. The song is an explosive, excessively distorted shout-along that brings to mind the blown-out sound of Siltbreeze acts like Times New Viking and Eat Skull, or the proudly out-of-tune punk rock of Half Japanese. But unlike those bands, Happy Jawbone's members sing with more of a whimsical, childlike disposition, an eerie aesthetic given the title and the chorus. It works as an introduction to the way their songs often juxtapose youthful innocence with dark realities of life and death (according to the band, it was written while members were studying at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and alludes to how "the ghosts of that epidemic walk freely around the campus"). Continuing the thread is"Fireflies Made Out of Dust", a crackly, off-kilter gem that sounds like each player is learning the song as they go along, screeching the blues in childish voices: "You drew an airplane flying through my head/ I might as well be dead."
The world of Happy Jawbone is shaded by absurdist comedy, especially in the way their songs are are so self-referential, recycling and re-contextualizing their own lyrics, melodies, song titles, and motifs from record to record: fires, broken glass, butter, and bugs, particularly fireflies, are all popular song topics. Halfway through Family Matters, there's a wacky aside in "The Album So Far...", which takes the first half of the tape and compacts it into the length of a single track; to date, they've recorded three variations on "At the Hotel Double Tragedy"-- the version here sounds cartoonish and toy-like.
Happy Jawbone's disturbed take on whimsy and rebellious, youthful spirit recalls lo-fi stables, Elephant 6 and K Records: The alien-sounding "Martian Santa" comes from a Christmas album they released in 2011, and brings to mind the way the Music Tapes treat holiday tunes; the record's final song, the six-minute "Don't Tread on the Museums of Your Youth", reads like a poetic distillation of all this band's complex ways of dealing with nostalgia and childhood. But Happy Jawbone have their own thing going on, thanks all the same: Like Olympia, Brattleboro is a small town where a regional sound and tiny but fruitful community of experimenters (Blanche Blanche Blanche, the Great Valley, Chris Weisman) exist outside of the big city glare and sheen. On Tastes the Broom, Happy Jawbone Family Band celebrate the value of lo-fi as an act of direct resistance to the toxic gloss of professionalism, making a persuasive statement in defense of wide-eyed amateurism in the process.
