Aural Aggravation

Blaggers Records – 30th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Earlier this year, JW Paris were the millionth act to cover Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ – a song that bombed on initial release in 1989 and only started getting attention when it was featured on the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, and becoming a hit in 1991. What was interesting about JW Paris’ version is that it was different. It didn’t pussyfoot around being nice and delicate – not that it was insensitive or trashed the original, it just had the guts to be different instead of a predictably, safe, straight copy. And I suppose this sums the band up, really. They do their own thing – and it so happens to be good.

‘Leave It Alone’ is three-and-a-half minutes of choppy post punk with bite – not to mention a yawning guitarline that evokes the essence of Nirvana and The Pixies, straddling a magnificent strolling bassline and exploiting that classic quiet / loud dynamic – but keeping the overdrive in check in favour of a cleaner guitar sound – but with a chorus that’s eminently moshable.

Yes, of course it all pulls me back to the early 90s – no one song or band or anything specific, but that vague, aching haze of what it was like to be there in my late teens and early twenties. There’s some recycled gag about the 60s now being applied to the 90s along the lines of if you can remember the decade, you weren’t there, and there’s an element of truth on a personal level with it being the time I got into beer (and vodka) and live music, but there’s that other key element, namely the passage of time. It’s not even about memory fading: when you’re living life and simply in the midst of things, you don’t stop to take stock or pin a marker on your memory that any given moment in time was something to remember as special. It’s only in hindsight – even if that hindsight is developed in relative proximity to the event – that you often come to appreciate things for what they were. This is, of course, the nature of nostalgia, and why people in their thirties become fixated on the ‘golden age’ of music, movies, and TV, which almost invariably coincides with their late teens and early twenties before the weight of adulthood and the crushing tedium of work and shit took over. But I say this because the further a time recedes into history, the vaguer and more nebulous the recollections become.

It’s not that I can’t pinpoint where bands have leaned on Nirvana or The Pixies for inspiration, but the bigger – and vaguer – picture is that TV and radio and gigs were awash with acts which represented the zeitgeist: it’s impossible to remember all of the little bands who maybe released one single or nothing at all, who played in upstairs rooms in poky pubs, but the period overall is indelibly etched into my memory banks. And this is important, because JW Paris don’t sound like they’ve studied key albums of the time and appropriated accordingly, but have, instead, soaked up the spirit and distilled it into a sweet and powerful shot.

There are layers to this: ‘Take a look at me, am I the person that you wanna be?’ becomes ‘am I who you want to see?’ How much is projection, perception? And not just perception of others, but self-perception. Look in the mirror: are you who you want to see? And how much does that change over time? It’s not always easy to make peace with your former selves.

Speaking on the single, the band say “‘Leave It Alone’ is a deeply personal song that reflects our own inner journey of self-discovery and acceptance… With honest lyrics and a haunting melody, it invites our audience and listeners on an introspective exploration of identity and the longing for inner peace”.

And I guess that’s what the preceding five-hundred-word contemplation is: it’s my introspective exploration, as inspired by the song. A good song does so much more than fill a few minutes with sound: it enters you and takes you places. ‘Leave It Alone’ is a fucking good song.

AA