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Loose and comfy like the pants you doss around in late at night.
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Jape Squad – Breakfast With…
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Loose and comfy like the pants you doss around in late at night.
"
Jape Squad – Breakfast With…
A few weeks ago, at a bus stop in Lisse, I got my hands on something small, perfectly rounded and Australian. And no, it wasn’t Kylie. After recovering from this obviously crushing disappointment, I dried my tears to find Breakfast With… by 7 man Melbourne formation Jape Squad, an album which took about 7 months to make it from Oz, all the way to my grubby little mitts at that cold, Dutch bus stop. Hardly a new release then, but what the hell, I won’t tell if you won’t.
Breakfast With… is Jape Squad’s second album, their first for independent Aussie label Spooky Records (distributed around these parts by those Dingo lovers over at Undertow). We enter the record through "Heather’s Head" and it feels somehow familiar. It’s a bit like Pavement playing the scruffier parts of "Exile on Main Street" or perhaps The Stones of ’72 tidying up Pavement’s "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain". The next couple of tracks follow along the same loose lines, but this isn’t loose and irritating like the wing mirror on your Opel Kadett, it’s loose and comfy like the pants you doss around in late at night.
The smoky R&B goes for a well earned sit down, and Spot and Nabisco Stu (a truly great name, I think you’ll agree) step up and twiddle knobs and play with gadgets for the trippy interlude "Ryders". And talking of Ryders, Blake’s vocal is a pretty good Shaun Ryder impression for much of "Bug Spawn" which fades in to deliver more raggedy, jagged, easy, electric blues.
"Bus Monkeys" is a sneering, sliding country waltz, with a jeering, shouty chorus and the second third of the album is rounded off with a few more squelches and loops from Spot and my mate Nabisco Stu. The third three song third of the disc is a little more pedestrian and gives us more of a taste of Blake’s chameleon vocal style, which throughout the album echoes Lou Reed, Liam Gallagher, Iggy Pop, Nick Cave and Lloyd Cole, but not necessarily in that order.
Breakfast With… is the sort of album that you could put on when you’ve got friends round and they would say "Who’s this?". "Jape Squad" you’d reply and your friends would probably look surprised and say "Oh, I thought it was……………".
It has a well-worn familiarity and contains enough user-friendly licks and tricks to make it an enjoyable record. The songs are, for the most part, well written and they create a confident and relaxed groove but I’d like to hear them do something a little more daring or unsafe and I shall just go back to my bus stop and wait for Kylie until they do.
Words : MONO