Love as Laughter
Destination 2000 (Sub Pop)
by Dave Liljengren
It doesn’t rock. It screams. It doesn’t roll. It steamrolls. What’s more, it has a message for the youth of America. “Stay Out of Jail,” the first song on Love as Laughter‘s Destination 2000, is a raucous marvel. From the first note, snarling, growling, guitar riffs peppered with drums of fury and lyrics born of slammer time jump from the spinning silver like a hyperactive eight-year old after a bowl of Lucky Charms. Love as Laughter guitarist and founder, Sam Jayne, wrote the song after a day in the pokey, and though tongue is firmly in cheek at all times and in all places relating to Love as Laughter, he does want kids to stay out of jail. “The song, ‘Stay Out of Jail,’ has a message for young people,” he has said.
After the wailing gangsta preface of the first song, D 2000 burrows deeper and with increasing complexity into Jayne’s ideas and influences. The impertinent energy driving the disc, however, never lets up. Like a problem child desperate for attention, it stays in your face until you focus completely on the ten successive rants recorded therein.
Seattleite Jayne, a master of punkish, lo-fi garageshock in the Northwest tradition of the Makers, Wailers, and Sonics on previous LAL outings, The Greks [sic] Bring Gifts (1996) and #1 USA (1998), has crafted D 2000 as a tribute to the fat (and definitely not “phat” by any era’s jargon), beefy, blues-torturing, rock Ness monsters of the late sixties and early seventies. The title track has been kissed by the trademark tongue and lips of “Glimmer Twins” Jagger and Richards. “Freedom Cop” summons Dylan while “On the Run” pays underflattering homage to the late feedback maestro from Ur-Seattle, Jimi Hendrix.
Jayne, who compiled a tape of bad songs he calls, “The Worst of Lou Reed,” nonetheless takes inspiration from the leather-jacketed-one. “Margaritas,” Jayne’s Reed send-up, is the disc’s best track, perhaps because Reed’s deliberate melding of flophouse profundity with low-rent instrumentation has a ready modern cognate in Jayne’s spontaneous, from-the-jailhouse-to-Mom’s-house, basement-studio aesthetic.
Don’t waste time focusing on the forward-looking title or the disc’s futuristic cover. Jayne laughs off as farcical the title’s Y2K reference, saying D 2000, “has more to do with 2000 Flushes than it has to do with the year 2000.” That aside, this energetic disc makes for a good listen. Jayne makes old ideas new again through the sheer force of his truculent personality. His new bandmates (there was a complete overhaul after the #1 USA tour) follow him here, there, and everywhere with beat-striking alacrity and the unwavering zeal of fresh-faced converts new to the ways of millennial, apocalyptic, musical ventures.
(1932 1st Ave. #1103 Seattle, WA 98101)
