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Album Review: Jagwar Ma – Howlin

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Since Primal Scream and The Happy Mondays were conveniently taken under the wing of an entire decade’s worth of people who were as similarly smashed as they were, attempts to forge a crossover between rock and dance music have spluttered at best. There have been high points (the first few records by The Rapture) and lows (the last few records by The Rapture), yet never anything that’s captured a zeitgeist in the same way as was managed in the early Nineties. But with the kind of people who don’t mind having the term ‘EDM’ applied to them today filling venues larger than any of their guitar-wielding contemporaries, perhaps the stars are aligned in such a way that another attempt at bridging the gap could once again find similar favour.

Jagwar Ma, alias Jono Ma and Gabriel Winterfield, must certainly be hoping so. The duo land so squarely in the middle of the dance/rock Venn diagram that there are moments on their debut where one has to double take to make sure you aren’t actually listening to Sean Ryder, Bez et al. (‘Exercise’ in particular has me wondering if they aren’t twisting my melon, man). But fair play, Madchester must have seemed paradoxically kind of exotic if you grew up in Sydney, and the young pair certainly seem like they have the momentum to make this more than just a passing fad.

The Throw’ is Jagwar Ma at their best, displaying their skills for layering up a song to dramatic crescendos, and making great use of that amazing zooming guitar noise, which is by far their best noise. Its baggy beats and throbbing grooves are replicated across the album’s peaks, of which the opening ‘What Love’, with its all encompassing bass swagger, and ‘That Loneliness’, which manages to blag The Beach Boys, The Stooges and Bill Haley into the same club at once, are the highest.

Yet there are problems. Jagwar Ma obviously count themselves as a dance concern first and foremost, as you really couldn’t imagine a rock band other than, say, The Twang getting away with lyrics that are quite this inane. The thought strikes you especially in the dragging final third of yet more woozy electro sprinkled with jagged guitars that they’d be an infinitely better band if they actually had anything at all to say. Nevertheless, the grooves here are large enough, and the mastery of melody already so developed, that one suspects greater things are quite possibly to come.

- Thomas Hannan

Howlin is available from June 10 on Marathon. You can pre-order it here.


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