Happy Jawbone Family Band (Vinyl)

We talk about the journeys on which music can take us, but really, where do we go? The rock club? The record store? The mall? Online? No way; the trip is internal. Inside our minds, maybe our souls. Thats where we go.

Listening as a shared experience is somewhat of a false ideal. We dont know what the Happy Jawbone Family Band will sound like to you. We dont know what youve heard, what youve lived through. What you see is solely based on your own experiences. It can be the greatest vista youve ever encountered, the life of your mind.

Someone makes a mixtape for you, and you can guess as to its intent, but only the compiler can tell you what it means. We did that earlier this year with Tastes The Broom, our introduction of freewheeling Brattleboro, Vermont rock/folk wonderments the Happy Jawbone Family Band, to Mexican Summer. This self-titled effort serves as the fulfillment of that work. We set the levels. Since the vinyl edition sold out in a matter of weeks, we assume that the record-buying public agrees with us.

Now its the bands turn to make the adjustments. And what theyve given us, to give to you, represents their finest and most directly fulfilling music to date. The energy and humor of early releases remains, maybe even more so given their development over the years. That band you may have loved before has grown even stronger and more potent; its songs have become monuments to individualism, to longing, to happier endings resulting from imperfect circumstances, steered by their history (they all met at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and took it from there) and their placement on the globe. Binding folk, indie rock and pop forms together is easy enough; its what this band does with them, how it builds its sentiments and bursts preconceptions, that put them in a place where these musicians can rest, comfortably above and apart from almost every band working in this same terrain today. Its not apples and oranges were talking about here, its Lindsey Buckingham and oranges.

The Jawbone recorded this new album with Jarvis Taverniere (Woods, Meneguar, producer of many a great record over the last few years), and hes shown how to open up their sound without sacrificing the bouts of whimsy and peculiar emotions that arose from previous efforts. The bands met the challenge as well, whether it be songs about finding your father in a dress, trying to resolve the differences between two people, or boiling down childrens literature into the underlying parables, no matter how crass (their incredible ballad Hans Christian Andersens The Little Mermaid sums up this experience: I really fucked up this time). The immediate charms that D-R-E-A-M-I-N will lay on you reverberate across the rest of the album, on which were hearing the trippiest moments of the Beatles, the aforementioned Lindsey at the peaks he reached on Tusk, and both poles of American post-punk songwriting royalty, Camp

• Genre: Rock
• Internal ID: JITRE
• Released: 11/5/13
• Format Detail: LP
• Format: Vinyl
• Genre: Rock