Working For A Nuclear Free City - The Jojo Burger Tempest

Work­ing For A Nuclear Free City
The Jojo Burger Tem­pest
Melodic; 2010

Guest Con­trib­u­tor: Jen Broadwell

Despite the fact that The Jojo Burger Tem­pest is the sec­ond release for British post-​rock band Work­ing For A Nuclear Free City, the band uses the open­ing track, “Do A Stunt,” to serve as a nec­es­sary brief­ing on what the band is all about. The song is flooded with rapid, obscure instru­men­ta­tion that stands along­side stiff bass lines and slower gui­tar riffs. It’s a short song — good intro­duc­tions should be short and mem­o­rable — and it ends abruptly in order to move on to big­ger and bet­ter things.

“Silent Times” kicks in next, act­ing a har­mo­nious changeover to British inva­sion sway, and this is fol­lowed by “Auto­blue,” a track that switches gears yet again, this time escort­ing us into an elec­tronic set­ting. The band cap­tures its entire styl­is­tic mul­ti­tude within the first half of the album’s first disc: “Pach­inco” con­tin­ues with a half-​baked nu-​gaze expe­ri­ence, while “Float Bridges” car­ries a more gen­tly, or float­ing, type of shoegaze. “A Black Square With Four Yel­low Stars” is my favorite song, as its beau­ti­ful piano base is paired with a swift, yet sub­tle electro-​beat and topped off with a few del­i­cate strings.

While vocals aren’t a strong com­po­nent on the record, “The King and June” attempts to tell us a story using words. Accord­ing to the lyrics, he’s drunk again and locked in his day­dream. This song is odd because it could eas­ily belong to a brush-​and-​snare folk or singer-​songwriter genre. It could pro­ceed with merely a sta­ble bass pulse — which I can hear in the dis­tance — but I also hear slight dis­tor­tion and a gui­tar that grows stronger and stronger and finally fades as the song comes to a close.

On the whole, the first half of disc one is def­i­nitely more ver­sa­tile than the rest. “Inokashira Park” is an exper­i­men­tal electric-​rock blend that turns into an aver­age cloud ride com­plete with the acoustic graces. “B.A.R.R.Y” is another inter­est­ing song as it rests on strings and per­cus­sion then offers a hint of techno.

“The Jojo Burger Tem­pest” stands as the entirety of the album’s sec­ond disc: a half-​hour track of idle mixes sol­dered into a mas­ter­piece of com­pre­hen­si­ble tran­si­tions, pecu­liar tex­tures, and psy­che­delic sound effects. It’s a col­lage of all the left­over record­ings Work­ing For A Nuclear Free City couldn’t force them­selves to scrap. Nev­er­the­less, since the sounds play con­tin­u­ously, with­out the two sec­onds worth of typ­i­cal between-​song silences, the assorted col­lec­tion of influ­ences the band employs even­tu­ally began to flow together into rec­og­niz­able form. For being ini­tially con­fus­ing, The Jojo Burger Tem­pest even­tu­ally achieved a coher­ence that the first disc cer­tainly did not mas­ter on its own.