Little Jack Melody & His Young Turks
Live — Noise and Smoke (Kilroy)
Mostly due to their geographical origins in Denton, Little Jack Melody started out with the rep of being something of a “Little Brave Combo,” but it soon became obvious they preferred to tread the less sunny side of the street. This recent live effort is musically tight, strong on song selection, painting a portrait of the band as a cross between Sinatra and Waits, with bits of Brecht and Nordine thrown in on the side. After an opening that sounds like a Leonard Pinth-Garnell speech written by Michael O’Donohue, the band delivers something that’s a far cry from Bad Theatre. With a tendency toward taking the music of yesteryear and giving it lyrics with far deeper meaning than the songsmiths of the last century envisioned (“The Dance Lesson” is well-described as a “dysfunctional co-dependency tango” for example), Melody finds his forte in bringing the sounds of a bygone age into the next century, making nearly every track on Noise and Smoke an impressive beacon for tomorrow. Except for the cover of Quiet Riot’s “Cum On Feel the Noize,” of course, which they can only be forgiven for because they started covering it swing-style before Austin’s Recliners did.
This article appears in September 8 • 2000.