Album Review: Jaguar Love - Hologram Jams
- Written by Rosie Duffield
Hologram Jams starts with strained screeching: ‘‘I started a fire/I started a fire!’’ – and continues in this way for the remaining 12 tracks. In sounds reminiscent of MGMT’s bi-vocal psychedelic merriment; ‘I Started A Fire’ gets the album off to a rip-roaring start, as Johnny Whitney and Cody Votolato try to outdo each other in a decibel-raising, falsetto fashion.
Jaguar Love’s second album does however differ quite a bit from MGMT’s laidback songs; JL favour a more upbeat, disco-electro sound. Bouncy, happy-clapping sounds come in the form of ‘Don’t Die Alone’, a song that would sit well in a trendy, darkened club with teenage scenesters bopping up and down with their tiny skinny jeans and big hair.
One of the better tracks, ‘Jaguar Warriors’ takes on an almost urban edge, the oft-chanting of ‘’Jaguar warriors, ride the backs of fire fireflies/The streets are motionless, we freeze time with our cracked headlight eyes...’’ sounding more than similar to Santogold or Missy Elliott.
A somewhat gentler affair, with glockenspiels and fewer falsetto notes (although the odd squeal remains), ‘Evaline’ is probably one of the more listenable tracks on the album. In contrast, ‘Freak Out’ starts out like an early ‘90s dance record, soon overcome with Whitney’s tortured vocals and an annoying ‘’Oh oh oh’’ backing vocal.
The album’s highlight is perhaps just so because it’s not one of Jaguar Love’s own creations – a version of ‘Piece of my Heart’, the much covered Erma Franklin tune (also done by Janis Joplin, Faith Hill and Beverley Knight to name but a few). Whitney’s pained vocal fits in rather well with the lyrics, although the music arrangement does sound a bit Black Eyed Peas, and toward the end the bass line gets a bit too close to Grease’s ‘Summer Loving’.
Hologram Jams is quite a fun, upbeat album – but all the screaming does get tiresome after a while. It at times fall into contrived, pop-punk (‘Cherry Soda’), which lets the album down massively. I want to like this album, but it’s trying just a bit too hard to be different and cool. I was going to say that it is quite a different sound – but there are too many comparisons to be able to go that far. And, like the album, not all of them are good.