“I’m facing four walls / I’m going nowhere at all” complains a frustrated Jupiter in Velvet at the onset of the record-opening “And so the Earth Stood Still” from Punk Goes the Velvet, his vocal and its lyrics echoing much of the mood that will persist throughout the entirety of the tracklist here. Putting rebellion at the forefront of his sound like few others in his peer group would be brave enough to do, Jupiter in Velvet is making headlines once again this autumn with his musical moxie – this time coming in the form of a punk EP for the ages.
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Our man isn’t just using words to make a statement in this new record – in songs like “Dimestore Suave” and the blistering “Get Out,” tonal communique takes center stage over anything linguistics could ever muster on their own, and despite the (intentionally) limited space in the master mix, the instrumentation tends to feel monolithic around every turn here. The intensity is coming at us from all angles in Punk Goes the Velvet, and in terms of sonic efficiency, I didn’t know Jupiter in Velvet had something as lean and mean as this EP in him prior to now.
Previous efforts from this artist had usually leaned more on the postmodernity of contemporary pop aesthetics than they did anything in the frill-less world of retro punk, but in Punk Goes the Velvet, surreal influences are excluded from the finished product almost completely. “Not Again” and “Please Don’t Ever Let Me Go,” the latter taking a lot from new wave and post-punk, leave all of the spacy elements on the sidelines, replacing them with a bludgeoning bass component (especially in the latter) capable of destroying your speakers if consumed at too great a volume.
Pop songcraft has always been a big part of Jupiter in Velvet’s sound, and it’s absolutely still present in this latest work. “Please Don’t Ever Let Me Go” and “Get Out” are essentially hook-driven tracks that could be reworked for the radio in an instant, and even with the grungy melodies found throughout this EP, there’s nothing that I would go so far as to describe as straight atonal noise. This artist knows how to make balance work for him no matter what the setting, and he gives us plenty of reasons to stay tuned for future output whenever he cuts something as artfully polished as Punk Goes the Velvet is.
Raw but as far away from the painfully low-fidelity meanderings of an increasingly inauthentic west coast sound, Jupiter in Velvet’s Punk Goes the Velvet is a great sampling of what this artist can accomplish in a hard rock capacity, and hopefully it won’t be the lone record of its kind to find a home in his discography. At this point in his career, I don’t know that he has anything left to prove to the underground scene that spawned his career; now, it’s all about making a mark on a mainstream desperately in need of his originality.
Jodi Marxbury