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Song of the day – 568: The Whistling Joy Jumpers

Song of the day – 568: The Whistling Joy Jumpers
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This quote, right here, is what sold me on the album. Partly because of the words, and partly because of the source:

The Whistling Joy Jumpers is a giant leap OVER the limbo bar. I feel sorry for Thick Syrup, having to assign a price to this batch of songs. If they charge by the rhyme, you couldn’t afford the Album. If they charge by the joy, it couldn’t even be sold. This is museum quality joy. (David Fair)

This one’s pretty good as well.

The Whistling Joy Jumpers are anti war, establishment, religion – anti everything but sex, art, peace, and pot. Surprising Wooden Clocks has 19 scenes of panting, chanting slow-burn music that take place amid a junk-art setting consisting of a broken down truck, a papier-mâché Santa Claus, a juke box, and neon signs. Jad Fair, Thollem, and Brian Chase are three rangle-tangle characters in tattered costumes, that keep the gleaming ball rolling at a steaming pace with shaggy color and madness. Their soundscape is a violent invention of sophisticated fuzzy freshness that makes it hard to tell where life leaves off and art begins. (Don Fleming)

Seriously now. Is it even necessary to hear the music in the face of such lucid verbiage? Isn’t it enough to let your imagination off the leash and let it run rampant, among the sails and wassails of New York City’s proud art loft and sodden breakfast cereal tradition? I mean, Bangs. Sometimes music can’t hope to compete with words, right?

Or do the words serve to pique your excitement, make you to start to feel slightly desperate and anticipatory and queasy, that there could be something else out there that you’re missing out on, and you don’t have access to yet? I know how I feel.

Oh, go on then. Have yourself a listen. And then go away and dream up your own jaunty playgrounds, your own treasure chests full of unexplained and bedazzled wonderment. That’s fine. Just don’t come crawling to me when all the magic-makers have disappeared because you stopped believing in them and now you have no one to lead your tiny trembling feet down the right paths.

Sometimes it’s impossible to put a price on words.

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