When you see a three-piece rock band live, that's all you hear: three guys playing and singing. On record, you almost never get that. It's much more likely that songs will be piled high with overdubs and double-tracked vocals. So Breathless, the first album by the Jet Age, winds up being different by virtue of its sheer simplicity-- with only one exception, the record sounds exactly like the band would live.
The trio is led by Eric Tischler, a man whose love of the Who is evident in the way he puts a song together, allowing for ample drum fills and guitar tangents. Tischler spent years as the nucleus of the Hurricane Lamps, who made a series of very raw power-pop albums, and Breathless announces his intention to make the Jet Age his rock band. It's not that there's no pop songcraft here-- just that Pete Nuwayser's drums get a lot of leeway to roam and Tischler reels off a higher than expected number sharp fuzz-tone solos.
Tischler opens the album with a long peel of cosmic lead guitar, but the themes he explores on the record are decidedly more terrestrial. His lyrics are full of natural forces, especially weather, and he relates them to family and the alternate feelings of safe harbor and tumult it can provide. "See what you thought you could never see/ A home, a hearth, a family/ A hundred feet below as you climb/ If you could just touch down before you die," he sings on "Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Lose," capturing a slice of the mind of someone who never made time for a such relationships.
As basic as the sound is, the band does a lot with dynamics to keep it interesting. "Slope" has gentle, dream-like verses, but when it gets to the chorus, the drums slip out of time-keeping completely-- the four lines of the chorus are driven forward by nothing but drum fills and frenzied guitar strumming with the distortion pedal off. Tischler's tendency to stay away from the effects when he's not playing a lead keeps things clean and uncluttered.
As fun as it is to hear a rock trio happily bashing away, there's evidence that they could do great things with a more produced sound on "Big Deaths, Little Deaths", the only song with an audible overdub. As the track stretches out past five minutes in a quick-tempo buildup, Tischler harmonizes wordlessly with several of himselves, and the effect is enough to make you wish he'd try it more often.
Whether or not he does, the Jet Age figures to be entertaining. Good songs played by a straightforward rock trio will always find their way into people's playlists, regardless of what's big at the moment. The Jet Age provides exactly that on Breathless.
