JOBS - Soft Sounds - experimental art rock that is not quite skronky. with a Zeuhl track (#8)
Give audiences a way into the bizarre and a way out of the normal. This ethos guides pop-minded experimentalists JOBS, and can be heard all over their latest full-length Soft Sounds. The album represents a creative leap forward for the quartet, one that finds them fusing organic, uniquely human gestures with precise repetition, creating an overall sound with distant echoes of folk songs, IDM, and 1970s jazz fusion. However, despite the subdued and soothing connotations those antecedents – and indeed the album’s very title – might conjure, Soft Sounds is a full-spectrum sonic experience best played loud, replete with songs that crackle with clarity and urgency. Recorded during drummer Max Jaffe’s recording residency at Brooklyn cultural center Pioneer Works, these sessions marked the quartet’s jubilant return to the in-person interplay that sustains their creative partnership and drives their most salient work. It was also the first occasion for Jaffe to take the helm as recording and mix engineer for the group, simultaneously using his hybrid electro-acoustic drum kit as a command center for many of the synthesizers, samplers, and effects that undergird Soft Sounds. The band arrived at these sessions with only a couple of guitarist Dave Scanlon’s melodies, bassist Ro Lundberg’s harmonic structures, and violist Jessica Pavone’s lines of lyrics. Despite the relatively modest batch of ideas, the sense of total autonomy afforded by the residency allowed them to write, orchestrate, record, edit, and mix in a semi-concurrent flow state. Across Soft Sounds, the sonic palette expands and contracts as each song sees fit. In JOBS’ music, Mark Hollis-type abstraction sits comfortably alongside grooves inspired by Jaffe’s time in Malawi. Their immersive sonic spaces suggest the speaker-test work of Ryoji Ikeda offset by soft-synth wobbles that recall an asexual reimagining of “brostep.” It’s in this reordering of the familiar and foreign that JOBS’ fluid approach reveals a sense of playful wonder and depth. Soft Sounds represents JOBS at a new state of maturity and self actualization as they hone their individual artistry and their collaboration across time zones and milestones. Max Jaffe contributed drums, Sensory Percussion, synthesizer, vocals, engineering, and mixing Ro(b) Lundberg contributed bass guitar, fretless guitar, keyboards, vocals Jessica Pavone contributed viola, vocals Dave Scanlon contributed electric guitar, keyboards, vocals
