Jargon

Jargon sprang out of the Golesta, CA music scene in the mid-'90s as more or less a noise-ridden rock band, but by the time it released this eponymous first album, the band offered quite a bit more than messy noise and straight-ahead rock. Released in 1998 (though recorded a full year earlier), Jargon is draped in raw, emotional music that takes a few stylistic hints — the beautiful time and texture shifts that bypass simple verse-chorus-verse songwriting, the taut intensity that stretches like a thread through each song, the passion-drenched vocals — from the emo handbook. Like other bands placed in the emo genre, part of what makes Jargon interesting is that they are obviously grounded in and love loud guitars and the sound they make, but are uninterested in the formal restraints of rock; instead the band mixes things up with engaging songwriting that focuses less on immediate payoffs — quick hooks, short melodies, lyrical motifs — and more on building tension with textural variation and long song introductions that eschew the abbreviation and terseness of punk and hardcore, a music the band is obviously familiar with if not expressly schooled in. The album is never exactly lush — there is too much punky attitude left in the bandmembers for that — but it is adventurous and emotionally forthright. Jargon is full of lovely weaving guitar lines that interlock and dance around one another and formulate into a tornado of sound with swirling and confusing instrumental passages that give way to full-bore stormy dynamics then back to calm. Occasionally the band seems to take the music a tad too seriously. Anger is inherent in the Jargon's music, and it can occasionally seem like directionless angst. The gruff vocals perhaps add a bit more of a sandpapery quality than the music calls for, chipping away at the dense music rather than bolstering it, but can also add an austere intensity that merits a song and fully rewards the listener. For the most part, Jargon is an emotionally complex and musically satisfying album.