Review Summary: It seems as if jj are ready to have fun again.
Has anybody exemplified the failure of hype quite like jj? Just a few months after their debut LP dropped, making considerable waves and igniting a great deal of buzz, Joakim Benon and Elin Kastlander revealed their identities and released their sophomore album, a dreary affair that took everything that made
jj no. 2 so charming and replaced it with solipsistic navel-gazing. The backlash that ensued was severe, with many dubbing
no. 3 a total failure, and it acutely displayed the ruthless ephemerality of Internet-driven music discovery. In retrospect, it seems almost as if the band was fully aware of the impending criticism, with "My Life" repeating, over and over, "What the hell am I doing right?"
With
Kills, jj's new mixtape, it seems as if the duo's despondency has been abandoned in favor of a much more buoyant disposition; the record opens with Kastlander harmonizing with herself before singing, "I got summer on my mind."
That's more like it. A straightforward hip-hop beat drops in, and Kastlander continues to sweetly sing "we go and get buzzed, get drunk, get crunk, get fucked up". There's a playfulness to the way jj take the conventions of pop music and flip them on their heads - "Still" is ostensibly a hip-hop track, but Kastlander's aforementioned delivery is too innocuous to have bluster, too knowing to be completely naïve. It's this balance, this inherent tension in such deceptively calm music, that jj's best tracks depend on. When combined with a Taio Cruz beat, Kanye West's immortal line "Know that motherfucker, well, what you gon' do now? Whatever I wanna do, gosh, it's cool now!" isn't boastful so much as uninhibitedly joyful.
Such combinations are found throughout
Kills, and they are mostly successful, suggesting that further experiments with sample-based music could prove fruitful for the duo. When they do falter, it's usually a result of the music feeling too obvious or easy; the prominent usage of M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" in "Kill You" doesn't work as well as it should, nor does the chanting from Kanye West's "POWER" on penultimate track "Boom". But then there's a song like "New Work", which pairs a cut-up "Empire State of Mind" backing track with lines like "I gotta go to work/and hurry home" and "Oh misery a place in me" - a far cry from the chest-thumping bombast of Jay-Z's original verses. No effort is made to hide the source of the sample, yet the music sounds utterly fresh. You could argue that the title of the song is a cheap and unfunny joke - you wouldn't necessarily be wrong - but the sentiment captures the urban condition in an appealing direct way.
It's always been difficult to objectively defend jj from the criticisms lobbed at them, because most of the points detractors make - the songs are mindless, the same old thing dressed up with some hallucinogens and glowsticks - are arguably valid.
Kills won't change that; it still operates in the same vein as the band's previous output. But songs like "Kill Them" and "Angels" show encouraging signs of development, stoking interest in what Kastlander and Benon decide to do next. Their story may be a perfect example of the hype machine building a band up and subsequently chewing it to pieces, but if
Kills is any indication, jj might be writing a different and equally timeless tale for themselves: the comeback.
