Jade Hairpins waste no time fulfilling their second album’s titular demand. From its harmony-drenched opening note to its baroque-anthemic conclusion, Get Me the Good Stuff is positively loaded with musical ideas, an absurdist buffet of sound and aesthetic that comes with one hell of a floorshow as the Hairpins stack those ideas higher and higher, almost daring them to crash to the floor. Instead, those elements of punksploitation, power pop, baggy, funk, and Italo disco are just some touchstones are not only held aloft, they defy gravity and convention.
These pyrotechnics are, in true Jade Hairpins fashion, something of a sleight of hand. While the music swaggers and gallops, Get Me the Good Stuff grapples with anxiety and self-doubt, obfuscating pain and alienation with sparkling wit and some straight-up ravers. Get Me the Good Stuff opens with one of those, “Let It Be Me,” in which Jonah Falco shouts lyrics about being alone with one’s shortcomings against guitars, synths, and harmonized vocals that are on the verge of closing in. The song is just over 90 seconds long, hitting with the gnarled-barb ferocity of punk and the gleeful insanity of theatrical art rock.
Released: September 2024
Cat: MRG781LP
Label: Merge Records
Listen
Tracklist
Side A
1. Let It Be Me
2. Drifting Superstition
3. Our House That Doesn’t Change
4. Get Me the Good Stuff
5. Telltale Flyover
6. My Feet on Your Ground
Side B
1. Lost in Song
2. L. I. E.
3. Put Me in the Picture
4. Better Here Than in Love
5. Live Free Underwater
6. In the Heat of the Sun