What happens when you decide to mix Queen, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles all into one giant ball of early 90’s power-pop?
You get Jellyfish, a short lived band out of California. So short lived, actually, that they only managed to make two albums (yes, I’m aware other bands have had shorter life spans, but humor me here).
I first discovered the band through Spilt Milk, their second and final album, about a year after it had been released. I was in 8th grade at the time, and our music teacher that year had been playing a lot of stuff for the class, things that I may have otherwise never heard. I wonder how many 8th graders today are taught the connection between Danny Elfman and Oingo Boingo? Or, in that same vein, how to listen for similarities between old and new music?
That’s where this album comes in. For those approaching the album for the first time, it’s liable to spur a sense of deja vu. Second track, “Joining a Fan Club”, blatantly quotes “Bohemian Rhapsody” in it’s opening bars, and again before its second verse. “Sebrina, Paste and Plato”, during the chorus, lifts the guitar part straight out of the chorus of The Beatles’ “Getting Better”.
All of this could make it seem like this is a band with no ideas of their own, and had they just stolen bits of other songs for the whole album, then that would’ve been the case. The magic, though, lies in how they have taken all the familiar sounds and made them all mesh together. Throughout the album, you get touches of whimsy and psychedelia that were so prevalent with The Beatles and Beach Boys in the mid-60’s, the giant rock attack of Queen, and harmonies done in the style of all three bands. This is all filtered through a 90’s alt-pop perspective; the songs may have the classic sounds, but the overall feel is definitely more modern than any of that.
The result is an album that ends up being comforting in its familiarity, yet unique enough in its execution to keep your interest from start to finish.
In retrospect, isn’t that the same thing the other three bands ended up doing as well? Maybe these guys knew what they were doing after all……you’ll just have to listen and decide for yourself.
(This article is dedicated to both my mom and dad, parents extraordinaire, for feeding me a VERY steady diet of The Beatles and Queen, which allowed to to pick out similarities both obvious and subtle, and Mr. K, music teacher extraordinaire, who taught me to not just listen to music, but to actually hear it and be open minded with it, and provided me with my first [taped] copy of this album.)
by Joe Jamnitzky
