All Time Top 100

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong - Freebutt

Perhaps in these dark days of plummeting sales and label redundancies, bands like JL&TJJJ are but one of only a few bankable options remaining. Every six months or so there’s a new one along with tunes hummable and spunky enough to grace the playlists of Capital and XFM, young and sartorially attuned enough to satisfy NME’s eye-candy quotas and invariably, proffering a sheen of authenticity trowelled on so thick as to dupe your Q guzzling, Tesco album buying 40-somethings into believing they are indeed the real deal. That they could actually be the new Stones, man.

JL&TJJJ, like every other band on this ceaseless carousel of mediocrity, reveal themselves to be a sham in the flesh. And like discovering that not only is the Emperor naked but he also has the word ‘berk’ tattooed across his big hairy arse, tonight’s gig is nothing more than a grim exposé of the gaping, irreconcilable chasm between the quintet’s style and that most elusive of qualities: substance.

Given the ludicrous hype surrounding them at present you could almost forgive them for carrying on like they’re already wrapping up 2008 with a 3 night stint at Brixton, but there can be no excuse for what followed: A 35 minute exercise in rampant egotism and ill-advised self aggrandisement containing therein, a succession of calamitous miscalculations that gave the entire set a toe-curling, watch-if-you-dare vibe set to their own weedy soundtrack of anaemic, characterless indie-garage.

For their opener the band set about a jaunty instrumental, gifting main man Joe Lean a full two minute build up to his entrance. Nothing wrong with a bit of showmanship you might say; but when you’re on your first headline tour playing to ‘please impress me’ crowds on a stage so small it can barely contain your five members the impact of such theatrics is deadened so much as to be laughable. Lean eventually appears centre stage looking rather more like he’s been trapped in the toilet as opposed to timing his entrance to the second from the wings. Across the set his put-on, shambolic between song patter weirdly recalls the twitchy socio-pathic manchild he so accurately portrayed in his recent stint in ‘Peep Show’ as opposed to the enigmatic, strung out Rock God for which he was clearly aiming. Later on, a deeply patronising attempt to stir an audience clap along intro draws all of two pairs of hands reluctantly into the air.

Muscially though they’re not entirely awful, you can hear there’s a degree of craft about the songwriting; debut single “Lucio Starts Fires” zips by like a freshly minted indie floorfiller and follow up “Lonely Buoy” with its frantic stop/start dynamics does at least house a cracking chorus.

But it’s not enough. This is a band so contrived, so predictable and so devoid of any musical imagination they have rendered themselves utterly pointless. Next!

posted by: Jim Brackpool @ 9:20 AM

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