It's with no great surprise that I see that JJ72 have announced their split.
The near comical tale of the third album, On, that they completely finished around a year ago, but have been unable to release following a couple of flop singles, has dragged on and on. They changed line-up, threatened legal action against their label last year and have been updating less and less regularly; eventually it has to come to this:
'JJ72 decided it was the end as it did not want to undermine its achievements by continuing a ridiculous argument with a label that would not be able to support the release and touring of the third JJ opus - a label who lost funding from Sony/BMG some time ago.'
It's a bit of a shame really: their singer had a voice which was certainly a stumbling block to many, and their was something decidedly teenage about a lot of their songs but I loved (and still do) a lot of them regardless. Underrated second album I To Sky even added a lot of craft and depth to the forceful angst and had some really great moments like "Sinking". The fact that they started in much the same time and (musically) place as Muse may have hindered them somewhat as they were clearlynot going to reach such heights, perhaps?
Hopefully "Radio", admittedly the only new song to sound especially great when they played new songs live, will see release at some point.
3 comments:
I liked their first two albums, although it was the adolescent quality that I thought was striking and interesting about the first. "Snow" and "Algeria" in particular are so outsized in their emotions that they evoke that teenage "this matters to me more than ANYTHING has EVER mattered to ANYONE," hormone-crazed state.
And the second one was, as you say, an interesting maturation. Chalk them up as another band with potential who never got to fulfill it, although I'm glad Greaney is keeping his hand in (he's a nice guy too, or at least was when I talked to him years ago).
Yeah I guess I didn't put that very well - it was that exact quality, as you sum up perfectly, that made "Snow" in particular amazing, but it did make a whole album of it a bit tiring.
I don't think that they could have maintained it either, really, so I was glad that they did find somewhere else interesting to go. Although it seems most disagreed.
Oh, and "short sleeves and warm skin, losing coins, calling next of kin" is an enduringly great and evocative first line
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