Review Patrik Jansson Band

With one foot in the 60’s, one in the 80’s and the head in the present, Patrik Jansson Band makes rock music that takes your thoughts back in time to when rock still was mainly built around the same structure as the blues. A direction within the rock I personally have a natural disliking for.

The old Hammond sound on the keys, the rockabilly guitars and the Bob Dylan-smelling use of harmonica are just some of the things I don’t really find myself falling for in combination with each other. The production is very 70’s in that fashion that it sounds like it’s made back then and in my head icons like Gary Moore, Deep Purple and the already mentioned Bob pop up automatically. Not that I think Patrik and his band ever will reach the same iconic status as these, but because it sounds like he’s taken more or less all of his inspiration from this kind of bands when he wrote and recorded this.

So, there’s not really anything that makes me automatically fall for PJB - in my ears it’s boring music that’s mixed boringly. The bass reminds me of headache, the keyboards gives me just that and the guitars are so terrible to listen at I feel like tortured. But that’s not enough – the vocals are strained, unpolished and without any traceable quality. When I hear this I just want to turn it off, so you might think PJB had some bad luck in who was set to review his debut. The fact is, however, my disliking isn’t a result of personal dilemmas – it’s because this is sloppy, unstructured and boring. The jazzy tunes’ coming from instrumental bursts goes in best Led Zeppelin-spirit but makes the band loose the track on what they’re doing. The mixing and production makes it sound like an old phonograph or run out vinyl record and whether this is made by choice or incompetence is hard to say but either way they could have done this without getting the mushroomy, noisy sound that now lies over the album like a wet rug and make the whole album sour. The result of this horrible sound is that it makes no difference that the band has written songs that basically are very different from each other when everything sounds very much the same anyway because of the flat production that make this sound more like canned beans in a Kansas forest.

In other words, the problem isn’t the genre of the music, it is the music itself. It’s made way too churlish and simple and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if all the instruments have been recorded at the same time in one take per song and then hardly touched afterwards. All this to give that “authentic feeling” I’m sure Patrik would say. But the will to stick to a certain kind of music and sound right for the genre is one thing, to simply be lazy is something completely different. You’re not excused for doing a bad job because you want to do something in a certain way and I bet 99% of the bands from the 60’s that sounds like PJB does would have wanted a better recording and production if only it had been possible. And that’s where the problem with this band is, they seem to think they can do a halfhearted job with recording an album, blame the criticism they probably will get on the “authentic feeling” they wanted to create and think everyone shall accept that even though this feeling is no problem at all to deliver even with a decent recording. It’s all about the will to do it.

So, for me, this is an album recorded by comfortable and lazy musicans and because of this it doesn’t have anything that interests me at all. I think it’s strange since both Patrik and his band members have lots of good references to show but this album is just boring and aggravating and even though it’s actually very creative, if you’re able to listen beyond the horrible production, it sound monotonous . The conclusion is that Patrik Jansson Band isn’t anything you bring with yourself until the day you die… unless of course you die by boredom when you listen to it.

HHHHHHH

Patrik Jansson Band s/t

Patrik Jansson Band
s/t