In the last weeks I’ve noticed the name JAMBOX several times during my night surfing around the blogosphere in search for new music and new hints, the fact that they’re from my missed hometown is a further bonus. I could be partial this time, but musically Turin always means quality, inspiration and above all great bands.
Three Italian young high school mates decided to form a group, whilst playing a kind of music surely not too much popular relatively to them. They rehearse hard, looking for a sort of cathartic escapism in an ideal, dream-like world from a horrible, disappointing fake reality (is this in the Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’ legacy?).
The result is a stunning, solid bunch of songs with their distorted, noisy, never superfluous guitar riffs; the hazy, dull but intriguing voice and the powerful dry rhythm section. A well-balanced blend of fuzzy energetic shoegaze/psych outbursts and dreamy imaginative lansdcapes in which we can guess the vast range of influences from the 90s shoegaze (My Bloody Valentine) and grunge (Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr) to the contemporary indie rock (Splashh and Wavves).
The music starts with a brief hypnotic lysergic instrumental intro of the ‘Green Lake’ that promptly blows out in the blissful surfing shoegaze waves of ‘Waikiki 513’, definitely a single in the making, flashbacks of a summer holiday spent together and the uncertainty of youth, ‘I don’t know what I want and I’m not sure about anything’.
It follows the reverbish slowed-down wall of sound of ‘From My Window’ about the troubles and the let-downs of the recent high school years, ‘nobody’s listening to me, no one won’t‘; and the intense dreamy psychedelic stream of consciousness of ‘Fruit Salad’.
The amazing shoegazey noisy ballad ‘You Are Not Me’ worthily closes the record in the most personal and painful tone, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know what’s going on’, the awareness of having a different sensibility from the cold, confused and zombified outside world.
A passionate and successful declaration of intent (although with its low-budget production flaws) from a trio that seems to have the desire, the talent and the belief to improve and succeed even in a ‘difficult’ musical environment like Italy.
Paraphrasing Baudelaire ‘in order not to feel Time’s horrid fardel… you have to be always drunk’ on great music…
Fabrizio Lusso