Jaguar Love - Hologram Jams

Jaguar Love
Hologram Jams

Prologue: You must listen to this album.

That said, here’s the reasoning. As a writer, you have to read what other people put about bands in order to get a feel for other viewpoints and, essentially, know what you’re going up against. You never rely on one review – it’s hard to rely on five or six – but you certainly understand when patterns emerge. Essentially, the exercise boils down to getting counterpoints. With Jaguar Love – the famed writers of Take Me to the Sea and a pair formerly with the altogether decent Blood Brothers – there are no counterpoints for what everyone else has said before about this release. Believe what you read.

Simply put, Hologram Jams is, without question, pretty atrocious. I prefixed “pretty” more for the purposes of an oxymoron, and also because I struggle to really let rip on any band because they have feelings too. Well, some of them. Then again, if I’d've written or performed as part of Hologram Jams, I’d've constructed a Total Recall-esque contraption in order to give myself a separate history in the vain hope that my previous life was, in fact, not reality. And that I’d see a three-breasted hooker on Mars.

I won’t go into Philip K Dick territory here as I simply don’t want to continue extending the metaphor of just how awful this album is, because I’ll not quite reel it back in before I’ve ground my teeth down to dust and sewn my ears up as a means of protecting my future sanity.

All I’ll say is this: the synth largely sounds like a dystopian Sonic the Hedgehog soundtrack; the vocals – which are apparently male – are so incapable of carrying a tune, emotion or interesting sentence of note; the beats sound like they’re being amplified through a plastic set of mini-speakers popular in the 80s; and, of course, the noise. THE NOISE. IT NEVER STOPS. Why can’t they just stop being so pissing loud?

No word of a lie, I’ve reviewed some pretty shocking albums in my time. Tulipomania by Boy Crisis is a prime example, as is Heart of Fire by Innerpartysystem. Mat Riviere’s Follow Your Heart was also diabolical. This? It doesn’t even register on the music scale because it physically hurts to listen to. I’m really not lying when I say that I struggled to get to the end… there was fast forwarding, chunk-skipping, then returning to them, realising they were indeed s**t and skipping them again, and a feeling of resigned defeat.

To calm down, I had to listen to Gary Numan & Tubeway Army’s greatest hits, knock back the best half of a bottle of wine and stare wistfully at the ceiling. You will too. That, or take an illegal substance directly injected through your eyeball. Your call; I don’t control you, and I fear you won’t know how to control yourself after a sample of this dross.

Epilogue: I want you, or even need you, to listen to this album. I demand you do. You realise just how glad you are for the records you love, as well as the genuine quality of newer artists. The likes of Gonjasufi, Lonelady, Kippi Kaninus, Pentatonik and Silver Columns all remind me of how music I love will always be there for me. Jaguar Love will, from now on, provide me with a waystick in the other direction. …I suppose there is a counterpoint out of all of this after all.

By Matt Gardner

Jaguar Love’s Hologram Jams is out now on Fat Possum Records. Sorry, guys.