top chart rock and roll experience

i became enlightened.

jimes is jimes

"Less Than Or Equal To Music" is a stunning work of genius from the up and coming band Jimes. Each song on the album presents sonic tromped loeil effects that are almost gauche in their immediacy. The experience is intermittently menacing, threatening and almost overpowering, and although the album navigates a number of passages which mirror the traversing of a long journey, it is a singularly industrial experience. There are lighter moments of optimism and pleasure, but the business of music is treated as a serious issue as well as the subject of pleasure, while the electronic percussion and the ceaseless rhythmic impetus of the music is continuously engaging.

The sonic evocation of matter and experience initiated on "Less Than Or Equal To Music" is crystallised in the song "Robot Porno," to take one example, which reifies its poetic conceit by employing a wonderfully grainy vocoder to speak the lines:

robot porno
robot porno
robot porno
robot porno
(uh uh) sexy sexy

Here one notices that the sounds composed and deployed on "Less Than Or Equal To Music" are marvellously tactile, but they are used sparingly with a lack of embellishment that allows each to be appreciated fully. There is a strong sense of the conscious construction of a sonic architecture to create an overarching tone-poem throughout.

Many of Jime´s signature characteristics are clear on this breakthrough album:

the distilled poetry of the lyrics
a distinct sense of pathos
an underlying humour
a fascination with technology expressed both lyrically, musically and sonically
powerful visual imagery (a cd changer, a bunk bed--the relationship between materials and memory)
a unifying, ironically postmodern concept (being a loser? or not by being one?)
a sense of nostalgia for unrealised visions of the future
exploration of an organic/technical duality
sonic reification
the painstaking construction of an advanced, synthetic soundworld

All of these elements are combined by Jimes to create a richly resonant and complex set of interlinked messages communicated with great clarity, a modern-day gesamtkunstwerk.