Rating: 4/10
With all due respect, this EP is like having sex with a bartender: enjoyable while it lasts, but lacking all manner of memorable details to make for a nice, juicy shit-chat at the water cooler the following morning. Jet Sam is an Israeli power trio, ideologically rooted in the old tradition of American rock trios. They are gifted musicians, though sometimes dangerously reminiscent of the megalithic style of Our Lady Peace and Days of the New.
That reverence to acts of the past is simultaneously their greatest virtue and their Achilles’ heel. Post-grunge is so dated it drags the dutiful ear into a spiral of arbitrary rejection and circumspect prejudice. But if you idolize Nickelback just as much as you say you revere Nirvana, this may score high in your summer passions’ hit list. Besides, Omer Hershman’s voice and guitar playing are irrepressibly good in academic terms, as are Yair Yona’s bass and Ran Jackobovitz’s drums.
Nevertheless, they end up sounding monumentally annoying after a second rerun, especially in numbers like “The Days” and the live version of “Man from the Park”. And so Remote is like a little tragedy just waiting to happen. These guys should have been told that tossing a hard rock album, with all the clichés of post-grunge, and never moving a millimetre from the safe rock n’ roll commandments, would put them at risk of a rotund disapproval.
If I had to highlight something from this 23-minute EP, I would choose the 23-second watering effect at the beginning of “India”. Just don’t take their on-stage curriculum as a consequent guideline! Even though they have performed in some of New York’s finest venues, they’re still too “monkey see, monkey do” for the average taste. Jet Sam is another abortive record away from falling into a collective purgatory, that of the act more ready to give a shot in the foot than a shot in the dark. So let me just put the lights out and see if they get the message.
http://www.lostatsea.net/review.phtml?id=51232798344c6775504af9
