nervousacid: The Jealous Sound are not the type...

January 31, 2012

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The Jealous Sound are not the type of band that get Best New Musics or ubiquitous thinkpiece subjectification, which is to say that when their new album, A Gentle Reminder, comes out today, chances are you will not have heard about it unless you’ve already been paying careful attention. These are the records that are hardest to write about because they’re not instantly polarizing — like that other record that’s coming out today — or even particularly heady; it’s music with the potential to make you feel inarticulate. But thinking about this record makes me think about this thing Joan Didion wrote about lifting the unfussy title to George Orwell’s “Why I Write” for an essay of her own: “I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you.”

There’s a modest refrain in this song where Blair Shehan sings, “I can’t do this on my own,” and it’s just inexplicably affecting. Like so many of the songs on this record, “Change You” sums up in a no-nonsense way all he has to tell us. Shehan thrives in such unembellished sentiment — he, virtuoso of the downstroke pick and palm-muted guitar riff — but not without leaving behind the dismal premonition that so many of the records that will quite possibly go on to eclipse this one are teeming with the kind of nonsense this album plainly rejects. This is the kind of record that changes lives, unbeknownst to everyone.

8:11pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZdfyZyFiF2_6

(Notes: 16)