Jellyfish- Spilt Milk
The most difficult part about this band is trying to describe its sound. The short version is imagine all rock history of the last half century compressed into one album, sometimes into one song. The long version is that Jellyfish take their influence from mostly the sixties and seventies, especially from the Beach Boys and the Beatles, but there is also a healthy dose of seventies rock in there to balance everything out. The Beach Boys influence can be heard on the opening track “Hush” that sounds like a cut off A Beach Boy’s Christmas, and “Ghost at Number One,” which imitates “God Only Knows” in the middle of a sarcastic rant about artists that only get famous after their dead. It’s a good one. The Beatles influence is more subtle. It comes in the jauntiness of the tunes on songs like “Sebrina, Paste, and Plato” and “He’s My Best Friend.” In many ways, this sounds like an album from the seventies that just got discovered in the back of a record shop. But it came out in 1993.
This album defies the listener to take it seriously, starting with the title Spilt Milk that suggests something not worth crying over. “He’s My Best Friend” is an entire song made up of masturbation innuendos. It’s iconoclastic, taking on the emptiness of fame (“Starting a Fan Club,” “Ghost at Number One”) and religion (“Starting a Fan Club,” “Russian Hill,” “New Mistake”). As you might be able to tell, it seems intent on tearing any kind of worship. It seems to say, “Don’t take those seriously, don’t even take us seriously. We’re just some rock geeks that formed a band and put out an album.”
But they clearly took this album very seriously, because it is immaculately produced, with a whole multitude of instruments (I even picked out a banjo on two tracks) backing up Andy Sturmer’s vocals, which are impressive, but whose lyrics, even his innuendos, are consistently clever and memorable. My personal favorite might be “You better catch me when I fall/ I’m on my roller skates” on “New Mistake” though a close second might be sarcastically calling someone “God’s gift to oxygen.” it’s not like other albums I’ve reviewed where the memorable lines come thick and heavy. Here you might get distracted by the great instrumentation and melody and not even realize there’s something else great going on in the lyrics.
5/5 I can’t believe this music isn’t already baked into the public consciousness. At the same time I understand that it sounds different not only from everything that was popular when it came out, but also everything that came before. It would have been better received in the seventies, but it still wouldn’t have been popular. And yet, it feels like it should have been. It’s like a reflection of that music, similar, maybe eerily so, but not quite it. It’s its own thing, it’s own style, and it is definitely worth your time.