Top 25 of 2008: #15 Introducing Gentleman Jesse and His Men by Gentleman Jesse

Image of Gentleman Jesse courtesy of the Gentleman Jesse Myspace page

#15 Introducing Gentleman Jesse and His Men by Gentleman Jesse (Douchemaster Records)

Gentleman Jesse (pictured above holding what I assume is a prop wiener dog) is Jesse Smith, bass player of the Atlanta retro punk band the Carbonas. They seem to be part of a local Atlanta scene that doesn't get a lot of national attention - I'd never heard of any of the bands on Gentleman Jesse's label, the quaintly named Douchemaster Records. Jesse came to my attention the same way a lot of people heard about him - he started getting good reviews on some of the bigger music sites and, more importantly, every one of these reviews mentioned the Exploding Hearts. You may have heard about the Exploding Hearts, one of the best bands to come out of the Pacific Northwest in the last decade - they issued one album of amazing pop songs in 2003. Shortly afterward, though, most of the band-members passed away in a terrible traffic accident, leaving music fans to wonder what might have been.

So it's not surprising that an Exploding Hearts comparison will get you places. And Introducing... follows through on its promise to remind you of the Exploding Hearts sound, perhaps to a fault. You may remove the CD from the tray a couple times to make sure you didn't accidentally put the Exploding Hearts album on by mistake. All the same influences are there - the Undertones, the Buzzcocks, Rockpile - it's a classic sneering power-pop record with no shortage of pop hooks. The lyrics don't create the same vivid world of neon-spray-painted garbage cans that the Exploding Hearts managed to evoke, but the songs take on the problems of jobs and relationships in a way that is easy to identify with.

Of the albums in my Top 25, I've owned Introducing... for the shortest period of time, but it's got a sound and a set of songs that sound immediately familiar. As a result, the album doesn't demand a dozen or more listens to get a grasp of what it's doing. It's kind of like the picture above - the wiener dog is pop music, and the kid in the shades is punk. They're staring each other down, but there's also a spark of kinship there. Gentleman Jesse rides this line between pop and punk to great effect on this record, putting some oomph behind the songs without sacrificing the pop hooks. And I listened to the record back to back last night with the Exploding Hearts, thinking that I could draw a one-to-one comparison in the tracklists, but it turned out that the albums are not as similar as I'd thought. "You Don't Have To (If You Don't Want To)" is one song where I was SO sure I'd heard the riff before, but I guess Jesse just has a talent for writing classic-sounding pop songs.

"You Don't Have To (If You Don't Want To)" by Gentleman Jesse and His Men