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JimesJimes - Less Than Or Equal To Music (February 14, 2005)

This is the latest Jimes Release.


This audio is part of the collection: MASA Records

Artist/Composer: Jimes
Date: 2005-02-14 00:00:00
Source: Jimes
Label / Recorded by: Various

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Reviewer: rosstaru - - May 10, 2005
Subject: #1
top chart rock and roll experience

i became enlightened.

Reviewer: MASARecords - - February 21, 2005
Subject: What Is Jimes?
jimes is jimes

Reviewer: MASARecords - - February 21, 2005
Subject: What Is Jimes?
Lets get a few things out of the way right here at the start. Jimes is not somebodys first name. Nor is it an adjective or predicate. Jimes is not a solo project. Jimes is not a band or group of musicians in the traditional sense. Jimes is not music in the traditional sense and many, both fans and the fantastically confused, would say Jimes is not music at all.

What is Jimes? Jimes is relucent genius, the treasure teased but always hidden out of reach. Jimes is a non-fictional narrative, a comic-strip autobiography for all ages, most of the time. Jimes rhymes with rhymes. Jimes is free and freedom. Jimes is a state of mind as well as an explanatory model. Jimes is a semi-musical experience, or, more accurately, a post-music experiment. Jimes is Brandon Ivey. Brandon Ivey purports to not know how to play a musical instrument or how to hold a vocal note. Brandon Ivey is a comic genius. Jimes is a rotating cast of Brandon Iveys friends. Brandon Iveys friends are an odd assortment of musical talent and comedic genius.

Brandon Ivey spent a few years here in Bellingham achieving a Journalism degree from Western Washington University. At some point along that path, he fell in with the short-lived Funanimal Co-motion, a loose association of fun-lovin friends professing nothing but maintaining various degrees of musical talent, comic genius, and ethically driven absurdity. Knowingly or not, the Funanimal Co-motion was a short-lived shot of vibrant, hippie-stained post-modernism into the collective arms of a stale art community too high on itself to recognize something glittering under their noses.

It has been a few years since those early days of collaboration and since then Jimes has released an extended EP and three full-length recordings. Jimes just released Less Than Or Equal To Music which is a reworking of the songs from In The Casino plus several bonuses tracks, including a few recordings of the brief, full-on rock band version of Jimes that took the city by storm over the course of two small shows. All of these recordings are available for free download on the Jimes website.

Ivey will be returning to the Washington from his current residence in Washington, DC, where hes mixing with the art-elite in a personal academic quest to finger the pulse of the next big art movement, to play a few quick dates in the Northwest and is gracing the Underground Coffeehouse on March 4th with Great Guy, an unemployed Superhero from Seattle.

Reviewer: kevinmchugh - - February 16, 2005
Subject: Greater than music
"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.