The Jaguar Club The Deli's reviews and interviews

The Jaguar Club’s music owes a lot to 80's new wave, but then again 80's new wave should owe a lot to the Jaguar Club. A lot of bands mine the genre for inspiration and somehow throttle the life out of it at the same time. The Jaguar Club’s spare three piece set up, of Yoichiro Fujita on bass, Jeremiah Joyce on drums, and Will Popadic on guitar and vocals, make new wave listenable again, without a hint of kitsch. They’re more Joy Division than New Order. Although the band is actively seeking to add to their line-up, the band gets a lot of sound from their three instruments. Popadic mimics piano and synthesizer parts on his guitar, especially on “This Year” from their EP “C’est Ci N’est Pas le Club de Jaguar.” Fujita and Joyce’s rapid, precise playing helps make songs like “The Sirens” innately danceable without sounding like dance music. Like their best predessecors, The Jaguar Club makes songs that are deceptively smart and stealthily fun.

Do any of you play any other instruments? Have you thought about adding any more instruments/members to your line-up?

We all play a few different things, we're writing new music now and we're hoping to get more of those sounds onto our next record. We've never spent long enough in the studio to really flesh things out the way we want to, so that's our main priority this time around.

Jera is a skilled classically trained pianist, We want to invent a way to suspend a keyboard over his drumkit, and he can play French horn and as well. Yoi plays some fine drums and guitar. Will can play enough piano to entertain the other guys by writing fake TV theme songs and used to know how to play the saxophone.

The Jaguar Club seems unanimous in their love for '80s new wave, are there some bands/musical genres that really divide you guys? What draws you to new wave?

At the time, when we first started playing together as a group, it was just the common ground that we had, without ever discussing it or even realizing that the music we were making had a new wave-y sound. We were aware that we had a sort of robotic or electronic sound in there, but we were always trying to just write pop songs. It's tough to listen to your own stuff with outside ears enough to really make that kind of judgment, we knew enough to think it was pretty good and to want people to hear it.

Now that we've got that batch of songs we've definitely started to go off in different directions. We each have a million different tastes, only one of which is the New Order/Smiths/Talking Heads thing, so it's been exciting to explore more of that in the last few months. We've been taking it easy on live shows and just trying to give ourselves time to write and to develop. We all love the classic Britpop bands, we're pretty into The Walkmen, The National, and Radiohead - bands that have managed to have some longevity. We've got a wealth of interests and influences that we were using in more subtle way before that I think we're now exploring more fully. We're getting a softer side and a harder side at the same time.

Your lyrics are pretty dark for the melodies they accompany. Is this intentional? What is the songwriting process like?

Will: I guess it's intentional in that I generally know what I want to sing about, which includes some subject matter that is a bit dark, and that i'm putting these lyrics to what is basically 'pop' music. But i think that's cool, the catchy pop song can be a great vehicle for any lyrical idea, and kind of forces you to work within certain constraints and make it concise. I just don't like music with throwaway kinds of lyrics. There's got to be some thought and some passion, or else why bother having a singer.

As far as the songwriting process goes, that's another element of the band that's sort of in flux right now. We've been experimenting with different methods of songwriting which has been good, another way to open up some more sounds. But, that said, we mostly write the initial music as a group. The 3, or 4, of us standing in the rehearsal room trading ideas and building something up off of that. We want what we do to be hook driven and catchy because that's what excites us, and there's a real challenge in writing this kind of music.