The Jim Yoshii Pile-Up
It's Winter Here
Absolutely Kosher

Anyone tired of the extended build-to-crescendo formula that has overtaken "serious" rock as of late, slowly raise your hand in the air and wave it in an increasingly energetic manner. Somehow the idea of serious music has been fused with the theatrical — if you aren't Godspeed You Black Emperor, Fly Pan Am or Sigur Ros scoring some tragic film lost in a Great Northern winter, then you might as well be playing pop/punk at a frat party.

Sometime in the last three years, crusty prog-rock icon Rick Wakeman managed to sneak back onto the scene and rewrite the guide book to rock and roll, editing out everything that punk taught us: that songs could be fun, succinct and go unnumbered and still be relevant. The Jim Yoshii Pile-Up aren't going to wrestle away music from Wakeman or any of his turgid cronies, but they may at least reattach genuine emotional meaning to the crescendo, restoring it to the prestige it possessed after The Beatles' "A Day in the Life," still maybe the best rock and roll build put on wax.

It's Winter Here, JYPU's follow-up to its self-titled debut EP, revisits ground that math rock originators Slint tackled on some of Spiderland's quieter moments, but with fewer oblique couplets about fortune tellers and pirate ships and more lines like:

You ask me what's my greatest fear
Well honey it's living here

JYPU confronts its topics of love and relationships in a less academic way, shoving metaphors aside while maintaining Slint's clean guitar sound.

The Oakland, Calif., band's subject matter sticks almost exclusively to the negative aspects of relationships. The lyrics are cliche-ridden, but inspired. The specificity of the songs' words combined with the meandering six-strings is almost jazzy. The subtle interplay and building of the guitars and drums coupled with the sweet tenor that holds the song together is spontaneous, yet still cohesive.

With the disc's last three songs, hope arrives. "Hello" welcomes the change to reluctant optimism as the final two cuts become progressive — there is less guitar noodling and more structure. A fantastic explosion of melody throws pessimism to the sea and rolls back the fog midway through "Before I Left, After I Got Back." After lamenting throughout the first half of the album, the song's perfectly placed crescendo rescues the mood and grabs the listener's attention.

Wrapping up with a blistering reworking of "Monotonologue," a song from its debut EP, JYPU heads "to the foothills," as the ferocious chorus says. It's far and away the album's strongest track; the guitars have ceased their chiming in favor of chunkier chords and, with the view provided by the elevation, the band manages to look past its sometimes trite complaints.

By balancing themselves flawlessly between what we've all heard before and an irresistible innocence, the point of view has switched. No one will care about the trials that may have inspired this recording, people will simply love the sound of the result.

— Yancey Strickler (ystrickler@yahoo.com)