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Thursday, June 22, 2006 

Winter arrives for ever and ever

Iain Forrester notes that JJ72 have broken up; I liked their first two albums, although it was the adolescent quality that Iain mentions as a bit of a negative quality that I thought was striking and interesting about their debut. "Snow" and "Algeria" in particular are so outsized in their emotions that they evoke that "this matters to me more than ANYTHING has EVER mattered to ANYONE," hormone-crazed state. I interviewed Mark Greaney for the Ontarion shortly after it came out and had an interesting talk with him about the teenage quality of most rock and roll, and a bunch of other things (before he left university one of his majors was philosophy). I might have to dig that out when I get home.

And their second album, I To Sky was, as he says, an interesting maturation. "Formulae" was a pretty good extension of that subjectivity they used to such great effect on the debut, and the stronger songs like "I Saw A Prayer" and "7th Wave" were pretty impressively layered. I would have liked to see where they went next. Chalk them up as another band with potential who never got to fulfill it, although I'm glad Greaney is keeping his hand in (he's a nice guy too, or at least was when I talked to him).

I've only got the first album - as you say, there's something very adolescent about it, like Green Day's Dookie but in a different way (and not always a good one). But they weren't bad, and 'Formulae' was OK.

Interested that you liked Greaney when you met him - over here he had a bit of a reputation for being a twat.

Well, talked over the phone, anyways - but yeah, he was nice. I didn't ask him what the band name meant, maybe that made the difference?

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Ian Mathers is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Stylus, the Village Voice, Resident Advisor, PopMatters, and elsewhere. He does stuff and it magically appears here.

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