
Jaymotts – Love Paralysis
You can’t please everyone, and last night everyone was at my show. (Ba dum tss!) Yeah, I stole that one from Mitch Hedberg, but stealing jokes is nothing new. Of course, among comedians, a bunch that takes a very leisure approach to drug use, violence, and even body odour, ripping somebody else’s joke is an unforgivable sin.
Yet, I think that’s an overreaction. It takes a great deal of good taste to know which jokes to steal. I have friends who go to open stage night at a stand-up bar and never even so much as earned a chuckle. Steve Martin may be selling classes on comedy, but don’t get fooled. Comedy is like tuberculosis. You either got it, or you don’t.
Dad jokes aside, Jaymotts’ Love Paralysis is built on a great, complex musical foundation. Takes a good deal of practice and musical chops to draw inspiration from Frank Zappa, a brilliant musician and awkwardly unfunny man (check out Sheik Yerbouty for reference), or the Talking Heads. Love Paralysis is a faux-Prince funk number with a few prog sprinkles. Well executed and warrants a smile and maybe even a jig.
In/Animate – Undocumented Event
I’ve always loved extreme metal but had a hard time playing it. It wasn’t just the technical capabilities required to go through even a routine number. It was the fact that I always imagined myself playing this with a straight face in front of an audience. Just can’t do it. I can barely contain myself while playing punk-rock.
Now, extreme metal, focus on the word extreme, has always been an arms-race to outdo the other band—basically, a dick-measuring contest. First, the riffs got heavier and slower. Next, bands started writing songs about evil things like iron men and wizards. Then, the music got faster and nastier. Bands even took to playing guitars with more strings in a bid to make the most sonically unrestrained music they could make.
Maybe we’ve hit a glass ceiling. The next kind of aggressive music to ship you around the room and make you cry “uncle!” will be made with the aid of machines. In/Animate sounds about as heavy as a band that could have opened for Slayer on their last bye-bye tour. Undocumented Event sounds like a computer having roid rage. It ain’t got much of a sense of humour, but it’s metal.