In a world of overly earnest indie, lowest common denominator pop, and rock music that can’t seem to pull itself away from staring at its own image in the mirror, those first spiraling, chiming, and charming notes of the latest Jody and the Jerms single cut through all the pretense like the sweetest antidote to the cyclical cash-till ring of the modern world.
I’m not saying that Oxford’s finest aren’t part of the here-and-now, of course they are, but their brand of buoyant, innocent-sounding, poised pop-infused indie seems to echo an early, more sonically sublime time—an era where The Lilac Time was the pinnacle of pop excellence, where everyone wanted a job at Sarah Records, and where there was a Darling Buds poster on every teen bedroom wall. Ahh, it seems like only yesterday.
“Hooch and Happiness” sees Jody & the Jerms doing what they do best. Riffs circle and spirally in kaleidoscopic reverie, beats bounce; guitars blend jangle vibes and jaunty rhythms, and ethereal pop vocals blossom and bloom from this fertile sonic soil. It’s pop in its purest form.
And if there is a touch of nostalgia about their sound, especially if you are old and indeed lucky enough, to have lived through the eighties (the actual eighties, not that chart-dross revival that seems to be all the rage…think The Primitives and The Bunnymen rather than T’Pau and Rick Astley) then you will be reminded that music is cyclical, the wheel turns, fashions return, the future is driven by what has gone before, and so perhaps think of Jody and the Jerms less as feeling like an echo of the past and more like a pop portent for the sonic shape of things to come.
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