2008 Woodie Awards
Jonny Doesn't Live Here
Jonny Lives! new album has nothing new in it.
Jesus Esquivel
Issue date: 3/22/06 Section: Valley Life
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The newest from Jonny Lives!, the "Get Steady" EP, is 15 minutes of bar chord New York rock that offers nothing new to the gritty genera.
Hailing from the same New York scene as The Strokes, Fountains of Wayne, and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Jonny Lives! has toured the UK six times sharing the stage with Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, The Kaiser Chiefs and The Killers.
What might have worked on the road for two years didn't transcend to the studio. At its best the music and lyrics are a mediocrity composed by musicians that don't know any better than verse chorus verse and a four-chord song structure for every song.
Maybe the simplistic approach is done on purpose to achieve commercial success. The title track "Get Steady" was written around a repetitive two-chord riff. "I started working out a riff that suddenly turned into this sleazy, psychedelic groove," said namesake and bandleader Jonny Dubowsky. "It felt dirty to even play it"
The second track, "Love Conspiracy," is a cleaner upbeat bubblegum love tragedy with the same song craft and a style that could be placed as the soundtrack to the party scene in a teenage movie of the week.The only song that doesn't require ibuprofen to listen to is "Breaking Down," an acoustic song that uses claps to accent the percussive guitar strumming over long notes of vocal harmonies, inspired by Yoko Ono's exhibition of interactive art at Carnegie Hall.
"She stood on stage wearing nothing but a burlap sack, and everyone in the audience came up and cut off a piece of the sack, bit by bit, until she was naked," Dubowsky said. "The song is about a female bartender who hates where she is in her life, who feels like everybody is picking her apart, taking pieces of her."
The song "Cliché" features Nick Valensi (The Strokes), Sammy James Jr. (Mooney Suzuki) and Jodi Porter (Fountains of Wayne) in a big collaboration to make a song that is a cliché in it of itself. The song sounds like any guitar- based alternative rock song of the 90s with lyrics that fail to induce apathy.
The debut full-length album will be released on 11-7 Records (a Warner Music Group/ADA incubator label) this summer and the first single, "Get Steady," will be serviced to college radio this month.
The songs are straight rock and the band is like all the "the" bands that were big five years ago, with nothing new to say besides, "Fools like us can live like kings."
Hailing from the same New York scene as The Strokes, Fountains of Wayne, and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Jonny Lives! has toured the UK six times sharing the stage with Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, The Kaiser Chiefs and The Killers.
What might have worked on the road for two years didn't transcend to the studio. At its best the music and lyrics are a mediocrity composed by musicians that don't know any better than verse chorus verse and a four-chord song structure for every song.
Maybe the simplistic approach is done on purpose to achieve commercial success. The title track "Get Steady" was written around a repetitive two-chord riff. "I started working out a riff that suddenly turned into this sleazy, psychedelic groove," said namesake and bandleader Jonny Dubowsky. "It felt dirty to even play it"
The second track, "Love Conspiracy," is a cleaner upbeat bubblegum love tragedy with the same song craft and a style that could be placed as the soundtrack to the party scene in a teenage movie of the week.The only song that doesn't require ibuprofen to listen to is "Breaking Down," an acoustic song that uses claps to accent the percussive guitar strumming over long notes of vocal harmonies, inspired by Yoko Ono's exhibition of interactive art at Carnegie Hall.
"She stood on stage wearing nothing but a burlap sack, and everyone in the audience came up and cut off a piece of the sack, bit by bit, until she was naked," Dubowsky said. "The song is about a female bartender who hates where she is in her life, who feels like everybody is picking her apart, taking pieces of her."
The song "Cliché" features Nick Valensi (The Strokes), Sammy James Jr. (Mooney Suzuki) and Jodi Porter (Fountains of Wayne) in a big collaboration to make a song that is a cliché in it of itself. The song sounds like any guitar- based alternative rock song of the 90s with lyrics that fail to induce apathy.
The debut full-length album will be released on 11-7 Records (a Warner Music Group/ADA incubator label) this summer and the first single, "Get Steady," will be serviced to college radio this month.
The songs are straight rock and the band is like all the "the" bands that were big five years ago, with nothing new to say besides, "Fools like us can live like kings."
