Sunshine. “Hot Button Topic” brings it. Your joints will free up and veins will pump with sparking endorphins; you’ll hunger for the mossy sting of fresh-cut grass stabbing up your nostrils; you’ll want to get your knees kicking high up; your fists will fold, and you’ll flail your arms as you jog out into the warming air — the smog of honking, zooming cars doesn’t even bother you; you’re off: This is a Summer Jam!
Maybe it’s those whirling synthesizers wailing and waving their silvery tones through some hip-shake-inducing mobius-strip loop; or maybe it’s the fuzzed guitars roaring their glorious growl and riffing out Millennium Falcon barrel rolls; or maybe it’s that bass, its boom kicking at your heels and clapping in your ears and keeping right in step with you like some zealous track-and-field coach ready to blare a whistle at you; or no, perhaps it’s those warm oooooOOOOOHooooohs at the chorus?
It all crashes together in a watery cannonball. Detroit-based Johnny Headband may never release this song as a single, it being smack-dab in the middle of their recently-released LP Who Cooks For You, but I had to give you, dear listener, the opportunity to tumble through it. How do you avoid hustling, shimmying, jitter-juking your shoulders to that beat? And to have it all flutter into this meditative calm of earthy resonance near the end… Ahh….
“Organic toothpicks, cookies for breakfast, staying the course, mom and dad’s divorce, hair in the drain, it’s not fair trade, cholesterol, two deers on the wall…”
All these hot-button topics and more get addressed, as Johnny Headband try to wake themselves up from this American Dream. Next month, they’ll be touring the UK. But perhaps, come June, July, they’ll bring this, and other particularly-propulsive tunes from Who Cooks For You your way, somewhere here in the states.
• Johnny Headband: http://johnnyheadband.bandcamp.com
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