Junior Senior's is the most exciting thing to happen to power-pop since the turn of the century, a sugar-coated mixture of punk, motown, R & B and rock. Junior Senior's music is a fusion of 40 years of popular music, molded to emphasize the energy and enthusiasm.
Jeppe Laursen, Senior, can list influences by the paragraph, ranging from soul to De La Soul, from the Ramones to Black Flag and the other bands that based portions of their sound on the Ramones.
\It's actually funny that we had some of the same inspirations maybe as a lot of the garage bands you listen to now,"" Senior said before last Friday's show at the Annex, 1206 Regent St. ""But then again, we also listened to a lot of '80s hip-hop, like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest.""
While garage rock revival bands inherited the genre of Iggy Pop and the MC5, Junior Senior took all the playfulness and fun.
""And it's really simple, you know, cut to the bone and not over-produced."" Senior explains. ""It's about writing a good song, like motown. We like the fun of it, but not like a joke. More like a glint in the eye than 'ha, ha, ha'.""
While the album is candy-electronica, Junior Senior plays each show as a rock show, with bass players, backup singers and a drum kit. Even after entirely changing the genre, Junior Senior songs still have all the fun and all the energy, even without the crutch of a studio to manipulate their sound into rainbow-colored, unicorn-adorned, childlike music. While has so much instant gratification that Top 40 bands should be jealous, hidden behind the guilty pleasure is well-written music.
The sound on their album is incredibly different than anything else out there today.
""[It was] kind of an antidote at the time to all the Radiohead and Jeff Buckley, [a way] to make music sound fresh,"" Senior said. ""It wasn't that we made our music because we didn't like something else. Everyone in Denmark sounding like Radiohead and Jeff Buckley fueled it. It made it more clear to us why we wanted to make what we wanted to make.""
Bands that try to follow Junior Senior will find themselves recording conventional pop songs, the bane of any audience that likes . Listen to this album. See them in concert. Junior Senior plays deceptively genius songs guaranteed to make you happier.
