Jawbox
(Dischord/DeSoto)
The good news is that For Your Own Special Sweetheart, the album Jawbox released in 1994 after leaving Dischord Records for a deal with Atlantic, has aged well. The bad news is that fifteen years later, it wasn't nearly as influential as it could have been, or should have been.
Proof? Sunny Day Real Estate's Diary turned out to be emo's killer app. But nothing seems more ridiculous than whining about the evolution of emo, so lets get back to the grownups: The best songs on Sweetheart have the kind of sonic bite that is prized just about everywhere today; the remastered version of the album -- touched-up by the band with the help of Bob Weston -- makes them all a little sharper, without pulling them away from the intentional alt-rock sheen supplied by original producer Ted Nicely.
Sweetheart's more dynamic tracks benefit the most from remastering, maybe because it was easier to highlight specific details from the quieter passages, including the layers of guitars on the near-hit "Savory," Kim Coletta's bass playing on "Cooling Card" and "U Trau," and J. Robbins' earnest, confident delivery of the verbose lyrics of "Motorist." (Robbins, incidentally, didn't fully come of age as a singer until he formed his post-Jawbox band, Burning Airlines.) But Jawbox was particularly skilled at embedding a melody within a rush of almost-irreducible noise, and those kinds of songs are as cathartic as ever. "FF=66," the album's opener, is as good as art-punk gets; "LS/MFT" is trickier but almost as satisfying; and the speedy "Breathe" and "Jackpot Plus!," though both very much artifacts of D.C. post-hardcore sound, are firm reminders that Dischord bands were typically unsatisfied with power for power's sake.
There's nothing here for punk-rock completists; the bonus tracks "L'il Shaver," "68" and "Sound On Sound" were previously released on a CD EP with "Savory." And the liner art that comes with the CD version is tastefully redone, but still bare-bones. Those are negligible criticisms, though, because the reissue is through Dischord and the band's own DeSoto label, and the point seems to be to simply reclaim the music -- to bring it back home. (For anybody seeking more context, there's a solid YouTube clip of "Savory" performed at a club in D.C. in 1997, the year the band broke up; view it, below.) So in the end, Sweetheart's sound -- muscular but careful, personable but occasionally confrontational, forward-thinking but rooted in trad-punk values -- is what matters.
Standout Tracks: "FF=66," "Savory," "Cooling Card" JOE WARMINSKY
