Jade Hairpins up their game on Get Me the Good Stuff

The band developed as a focal point for the considerable amount of electronically dominated songs the pair wrote for Fucked Up’s fifth album, Dose Your Dreams. Having recruited UK-based musicians Jack Goldstein and Tamsin M Leach on guitar and drums respectively, the band have, over the past four-and-a-half years, notched up enjoyable support slots supporting bands such as High Vis, Pissed Jeans, and Titus Andronicus at their London gigs, despite Haliechuk being based in Canada.

Their debut album, Harmony Avenue, featured a lot of melodic, summery synth-pop songs that were fused with the jangly guitar stylings of bands such as Squeeze and XTC. Their new album, Get Me the Good Stuff, features songwriting in a similar vein, but its arrangements utilise a harder-edged, indie-punk guitar sound that is reminiscent of the last two Fucked Up albums.

The fast pace, loud guitars, and electric organ riff of opening track “Let It Be Me” provide listeners with a good idea of the sound that is to follow. The music is muscular and thick, but Falco’s vocals being high up in the mix gives it a levity that other riff-dominated bands such as Pissed Jeans can lack at times. Lead single “Drifting Superstition,” described by Falco as “a Mondays-meets-Bolan, funky filo pastry,” then lightens proceedings somewhat with a poppier sound. “Our House That Doesn’t Change” and the title track continue the jangly, synthey sound.

However, the album also has some mod-style leanings. The rhythms of “Better Here Than in Love” offer a welcome throwback to The Style Council, and the power chords on “Lost in Song” recall The Who circa Quadrophenia. Whilst “My Feet on Your Ground” interestingly introduces some Hall and Oates-esque saxophones to proceedings, the harder-edged guitar sound and mellifluous vocals return to dominate songs such as “Telltale Flyover,” “L.I.E.,” “Put Me in the Picture,” “Live Free Underwater,” and finale “In the Heat of the Sun.”

Jade Hairpins have improved upon their enduringly listenable debut album with Get Me the Good Stuff. The album retains the songwriting talent and ear for lingering melodies that Harmony Avenue displayed, but it alloys those qualities to chunky, satisfying, often Bob Mould-esque guitar-playing that has come to characterise the best moments of Falco and Haliechuk’s recent work on their mutual day job. Whilst it is not this writer’s place to make pronouncements as to whether such redolence is deliberate or not, what is for certain is that the album displays a perceptible evolution in Jade Hairpins’ power as a quartet, in terms of songwriting, playing, and Falco’s yearning yet joyful vocals.