A few seconds. That's about how long it should take to figure out why it makes so much sense that Gentleman Jesse & His Men's first live outing came as support for the Black Lips. Because just as those knuckleheads have earned stripes pissing and bashing out garage recordings that sound several years older than they are, Atlanta's Gentleman Jesse (neé Jesse Smith) & His Men have found love in the rich, power-pop offerings of the 1970s. By no means innovative, their self-tiled debut succeeds anyway, hitting pleasure centers like Ali tapped chins: quickly, often, and with oh so much care.
Smith has become something of a local fixture in Atlanta over the years plucking bass for the Carbonas, a more abrasive punk outfit than the one he's assembled here. As Gentleman Jesse, Smith moves to the lip of the stage and softens up the approach. With an emphasis on pop more than say, power, Jesse & His Men re-imagine licks as dreamt up by the likes of Nick Lowe, the Modern Lovers, and the Nerves. But they aren't so much an update or study of 70s power-pop as a celebration of those sounds and all their jangling tentacles. While slightly less indebted to the punk kinetics of the Buzzcocks or Damned than the Exploding Hearts were, Smith and his bandmates still follow the same blueprint as the Hearts did so successfully and infectiously before their tragic end.
Nobody has done it so well since. With little or no fat to be found anywhere amid its thirty minutes of slip ‘n slide chord progressions and jukebox mining, it's a thoroughbred pop album that struggles only when trying to slow down. It's almost as though there are too many hooks. In addition to being a buckshot opener, "Highland Crawler" is a worthy kid brother track to "Roadrunner". Also an effective aural compass, that song's drumkit closing links directly to the opening of "Black Hole" without seams. It's a transition that typifies the slick sequencing throughout. From the balloon animal bends of "You Don't Have To (If You Don't Want To)" to the Rickenbacker poetics of "Wrong Time", guitars double as voices for choruses in their own-very hummable-right. Not a wordsmith like much of the humorists he obsesses over, Smith tends to rely on putting up lyrical wallpaper that's heavy on babes and light on the kind of pithy humor his heroes founded cults with.
But beyond that, Gentleman Jesse & His Men's major flaw isn't that that it is so unabashedly derivative or tethered so tightly to its corner in history. Many of these songs share such deep structural and lyrical similarities that they can often shimmy and bleed into one another in ways that overshadow how expertly Smith seems to have crafted them. While there isn't a truly bad song here, individual elements, when picked apart, are interchangeable. And yet, ultimately, all of that contributes to the record's familiar, and instantly lovable, appeal.
