| Folk wisdom holds that Seattle already had its day. Every city in the world (except New York, natch) is allowed only one chance to have a scene that matters --- Liverpool, 1964; San Francisco, 1968; Los Angeles, 1979; DC, 1981; Minneapolis, 1984; Seattle, 1991. You get your year to turn your sound into a scene, and after the public imagination wears thin, your scene and your city are gone. Either your band is just another regurgitator of the ideas and ingenuity of your forebears or you struggle against history's tide in a town whose music has gone past its prime. But that doesn't stop the musicians who still live in these allegedly over-the-hill cities from picking up the guitars and staking claim to the unexplored corners of the sound that made their hometowns famous. On this is the way it goes and goes and goes, Seattle's Juno does just that. The fivesome channels the echoes of guitarmania that still resonates in the rain-soaked alleys and avenues of this city, but ups the ante with an unexpected twist. Where trends these days move toward the brief and accessible (read: radio-friendly), Juno instead draws out the experience, building rich, complex pieces with a dense weave of three guitars. That's right: three. And only one proper guitar solo on the whole record! | Arlie, Gabe and Jason opt for the expansive, the repetitive, the heavily effected, the spacious, the spacey; it's incisive and addictive. The three guitars build a braid of sound, winding around one another in a melodic serpentine of emotional urgency and cinematic rage. You can't tie a bow around Juno as yet another freaked-out wall-of-sound guitar band, though; it's just not that simple. The guitars veer from the plucky clean reverb of "The Great Salt Lake" to the raucous, righteous punk rock of "All Your Friends Are Comedians," covering distortion, feedback, tremolo, country-twang and slide in between with effortless segues. More, done well as it is here, sounds like less The guitars, while crucial to the band's sound, are but one piece of the big picture. Let's not forget to applaud Juno's formidable rhythm section, carrying on beneath the din with a pounding fatness, holding the whole mess together with sheer brute strength and an incredible sense of balance. Finally, though, we owe a tip of the hat to Arlie's voice and lyrics, stating his surrealistic case before the jury in the harsh tones of "Rodeo Programmers," but making his most compelling argument alongside Jen Wood in the subtle harmonies of the sadly gorgeous "A Listening Ear." Folk wisdom be damned: Juno has found its way out of the long shadows of the "Seatttle Sound" and blown a fresh, interstellar breath of punk rock life into a scene written off as recently deceased. |