The Adventures of Jet- Part 3: Coping With Insignificance

Today's album of the day has everything to do with particular sounds that fizzle in my ears and bounce around my brain. There are many styles and genres of music I enjoy. I can dig anything from country to hip hop to synthpop to jazz and all points in between, but if I had to pick a favorite genre, it would be power pop (see: Jellyfish, Big Star, Teenage Fanclub). I enjoy a nice tight 3 minute pop song that rocks out with fuzzed out guitars and beautiful harmonies. If I had a desert island genre, this would be it. With every other type of music, I find myself trying to balance things out. If I spent a solid week listening to Belle and Sebastian, I would probably spend the next week listening to the collected works of Scott "Wino" Weinrich. But with power pop there is no need for balance. It rocks and yet the melodies are sweet and memorable. It is neither wimpy nor overwrought with testosterone. If feng shui was a real thing, power pop would be the soundtrack for it.

The Adventures of Jet mix power pop melodies with fuzzed out guitars and olde school synths. Call me crazy, but there's just something about Moogs, Korgs, Oberheim Xpanders, etc that put things over the top for me (see also: The Rentals, Ozma, and hardly anyone else). I literally can't get enough of this kind of music, so if you have any other bands I might not have heard, throw them my way.

The Adventures of Jet are from some part of Texas or another and they began life as Bobgoblin, a similar not not altogether identical band. For instance: Bobgoblin all wore numbered jumpsuits on stage whereas The Adventures of Jet, which has all the same personnel, did not. Information on either band is fairly scarce. I found out about them on the old garageband.com, which used to be a fantastic place to find out about up and coming bands back in 2001 or so.

Anyway, I downloaded (legally) a couple tracks from The Adventures of Jet, and after searing those tracks into my brain, I had to have the rest of it. I sent away for their first album via mail order with their record label (I cut a check, mailed it to the record label, waited for them to receive it, and then waited the standard 4-6 weeks for delivery. Simpler times really sucked in some ways, but the antici......pation kinda made it a nice payoff when the album finally came and it totally rocked).

In those days I was listening to all my tunes on an old squarish Sony Discman that had no anti skip protection whatsoever

For those of you who are too young to remember the joys of the early discmans (discmen?) imagine a portable music player so fragile that the slightest hint of a bump would cause skips and jumps in your music. You whippersnappers with your ipods will never know how good you have it. Anyway, you would have to hold the thing like a waiter in a snooty restaurant serving a member of the royal family just to get it to play a song all the way through uninterrupted. Everyone seemed to have their own particular technique. I would prop mine up on a tripod made from my index, middle, and ring fingers. When that got tiresome, I would lay it flat in the palm of my left hand, which is too stupid to be trusted with the delicate tripod method. All this old man ranting aside, the old discmans had excellent sound quality. My older brother, whose musical taste consists of classical music and jazz made by classically-trained musicians (see: Dave Brubeck) and literally nothing else, still has the exact discman pictured above and swears that its sound quality is better than any other music playing accoutrement he owns. Since his ear is much more refined than mine, I'm inclined to believe him.

Anyway, I spent many an hour spinning the first Adventures of Jet album and I absolutely love it. The only knock I could see you make on them is that there is little if any sonic variety on the album. They tend to play at only one volume and the entire album is one solid blast that never relents and never slows down. I don't mind that there are no ballads or downtempo songs on the album. They got the sound right the first time, so why mess with a perfect formula? Without any more meandering, I recommend giving Part 3: Coping With Insignificance a listen.