Music Arcades: Jaga Jazzist: The Stix

I assume I must have heard of these guys via Late Junction, which seems to have a pipeline under the North Sea, delivering every jazz-inflected release from Scandinavia to our airwaves. From there it made it onto my Amazon Wishlist, and my dear mum got it for me for my birthday in 2003. It was only then that I realised I'd inadvertently requested the vinyl release. That slip put me off listening a lot (it's a double album, and too much faff to change the record three times unless I really love an album).

Then I saw Jaga Jazzist were playing at the Mean Fiddler, and, as with Pumajaw, I felt seeing them play in front of me would help find out what they're made of. At the time the Mean Fiddler, along with other venues still in the Vince Power empire, had the highest booking fees of anything outside the corporate or arena circuits. I never understood the sense in that, because it was literally prohibitive for me (I don't mind paying top money for a top show, but if you're telling me the booking process is 25-30% as valuable as the show, well, the show must be shite, right?). There was a competition on the Mean Fiddler website to win a pair of tickets for the show. I entered and left the rest to fate: I'll go for free, but not if I have to pay that fee.

So — you guessed it — I won the two free tickets, and Jeremy came along with me. 1st June 2005. It was one of those self-fulfilling things. If I'd paid the exortionate fees, I'd have gone alone, and maybe concentrated really hard to get full value. Who knows what I might have got out of the experience. As it was, I turned up, possibly a bit late, with J, and we stood at the back and struck our go-ahead-and-impress-me poses. The band declined this ultimatum, and we felt we'd be losing nothing by heading off after 45 minutes to drink and chat in peace. So that's what we did.

That disengaged experience put me off playing the record again, until now. I hear lots of things in it, elements of Zappa, Tortoise, the 1990s Warp catalogue, King Crimson, Stereolab. Some nice juxtapositions, too, like the end of I Could Have Killed him in the Sauna, where the embodied acoustic of breath in flute plays against squelchy synth chords (those are synths, aren't they). Very accomplished, but almost too clever, and overall too dense and undifferentiated to connect emotionally.

I'm just echoing this Pitchfork review, which talks of the album being "plagued by the merit of its own complexity and taut instrumentation", "a homogeneous and glossy pattern of dense muzak that is nearly as compelling as a trip to the local dry-goods store," concluding that "an occasional jolt of humanity would endear Jaga Jazzist's songs to heart, rather than pushing us away with the pretensions of this particularly objective slab of instrumental music."