Jun. 09, 2010 - Issue #764: Hot Summer Guide 2010
The Jazz Age
/ Supplied
The City Streets {recordings_bands_mg} The Jazz Age {/recordings_bands_mg}
Clamour Records, 2010
4
Edmontonians-turned-Montréal-act the City Streets certainly don't fuck around on record. The Jazz Age is an urgent, lively and, most importantly, tightly-written rock 'n' roll album, pairing both youthful energy and the band's growing musical maturity in a way that finds them at the height of both."Midnight Sun" has shreds of post-rock wordlessly open the album before tightening up and hanging back to let in vocals, coming back in to add weight to lyrics like "We are the saviours of our shining lives / We might have to suffer but we won't ever die." The guitar work is ramshackle, electrifying tracks like "If I Go Back To Paris," and varies itself across 13 songs—there's a dancey rhythm to balance out the the weathered-leather shouts in "Irish Rose" and a slow-picked, string-raised sing-along chorus to the title track—none of it sounding like a step out of the band's comfort zone or done extraneously.
"All is Grace" finds a perfect balance of loud/quiet moments to carry the downbeat emotion of the song further, while nine-minute closer "Slothrop's Ghost" crowns The Jazz Age with a glorious slow-burner, the album's last repeating lyric—"Fuck the war / We're in love"—coming minutes before the album ends, letting the instrumentation leave a blistering mark. Something might have change in the future—if there's a drawback to The Jazz Age, it's that it feels similar to 2008's Concentrated Living, albeit at its peaks—but for the present, this feels like the pinnacle of what the City Streets have been doing more than well enough for some time now.
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