22 Jacks

Given that, on first listen, they sound like something a suburban housewife listens to while running on a treadmill, the 22 Jacks are a surprisingly great band. It’s too bad for them, financially at least, that housewives have never heard of them. Moreover, it’s too bad that really no one—aside from the few hardcore Wax fans who decided to check out the singer’s other band, or aging punkers who still follow the careers of the Adolescents and Agent Orange members—has even heard of them.

I saw the 22 Jacks live about six years ago when they opened for mxpx. I’ll say that again. They opened for MXPX. If my point that they are underrated is not fully illustrated by the preceding, doing a quick Amazon search reveals that you can purchase all three of their albums used for 25 cents, and a penny for each of the two I’m going to talk about.

A band who opens for mxpx, whose discography is worth less than a stamp, is either the most pathetically underrated band in the universe or is, well, terrible. But the 22 Jacks are not terrible. They are, as I’ve mentioned, surprisingly great.

They have two albums—actually three, but I don’t particularly give a shit about Overserved, which features 10 songs, 3 of which are live tracks, 3 are covers, and 2 were on their first album. I could speculate all day without approaching anything resembling a reason to release that album. They have two albums of note.

The first, called Uncle Bob, is a light and dancy romp about the singer’s dead uncle, Bob. It’s the second best album ever made about a dead uncle. The first is Sport Murphy’s Uncle, about the growing animosity of his family after his uncle died in the World Trade Center attacks. Sport’s effort is a brutal, tragic, and honest work about the psychology of exploiting the dead. Uncle Bob, on the other hand, is neither brutal nor tragic. It is, however, honest. And honesty is my only real requirement from music. It’s a requirement sadly ignored by too many musicians and too many fans. The 22 Jacks pull it off because they understand that ‘honest’ doesn’t mean ‘serious.’ They understand that honest music can still be fun.

The role of uncle is always an interesting one, and Uncle Bob was clearly the fun uncle. The one who showed up during the best of times, partied, spoiled the kids, and went home. The one who probably didn’t have any kids of his own, being much too irresponsible for that sort of commitment. He lived the fantasy of fatherhood, then retreated to the safety and comfort of a bachelor’s life.

The album seeks not so much to chronicle the life of Uncle Bob as it does to become him. Capture his strange and eclectic spirit. Musically embody the persona, the image that Uncle Bob created for himself. Then, lightly sprinkle moments of clarity across his deliberately superficial appearance. The album is deep. Much too deep to open for mxpx.

Musically, the album sounds like if you took the politics out of early Elvis Costello. The songs are infectious in a way that other songs branded “infectious” could only hope to be; infectious in the sense that you have to listen to the album again and again as a pre-emptive strike against the inevitable fact that they will become stuck in your head. The jangling guitar solo on Newspaper and Cigarettes alone is worth about sixty times the price of the album—which, if you’ll remember, is exactly one cent plus shipping and handling. The drummer, Sandy Hanson, is the type of knows-his-place drummer that your crappy high school garage band wished it had, but had to make do with Ol’ Rush McFillsalot instead. He knows when to rock and, more importantly, when not to.

The album cover is green, which wouldn’t bare mentioning if not for the fact that the songs sound, well, green. Not in the sense of being amateurish or earthy or environmentally conscious, I mean they just sound the way I imagine the color green to sound if it were music instead of a color. They sound green the way Johnny Cash’s songs sound black.

Then they go and put out Going North. It resides in the somewhat more familiar territory of failed relationships. The album’s theme seems to be about going on tour as a means of escaping the pain of breaking up. Yeah, I know. Not exactly uncharted waters, but the Jacks pull it off. Each song is able to stand on its own as a Buddy Holly-esque 3 minute pop song about breaking up being, you know, hard to do. But this album has a flow. If Uncle Bob surrounds you with a personality, Going North picks you up at a local gas station, shows you the entire country, then strands you at a rest stop nine hundred miles away.

It starts with the type of pop-punk song that would make Screeching Weasel jealous. It ends with a song that is as soft and cool as anything I’ve ever heard. It’s the type of song that makes you want to put on a leather jacket and sunglasses and just cruise around the city in a convertible. Which is what I’m going to do right now, in lieu of writing some profound conclusion to this.