the best band you never heard of.

Seriously.

Jetpack were a band in Providence in the late 90s. They released one 7" single called Investigator Man (on clear vinyl with accompanying comic book), and one self-titled full-length cd, on their short-lived label Sampson Recordings. I saw them play a few times, including opening for Don Caballero and on their own at the very hip AS220. Then they lost their drummer, and the remaining two guys became Hya Kcha, playing drums and bass-with-many-pedals. I also have a two-track cd of Hya Kcha's, cleverly titled "A Demonstration," which I will happily dig out and share if anyone's interested.

But back to the point: the self-titled Jetpack cd is one of my top 10, maybe top 5 favorite albums of all time and ever, bar none, and I absolutely pull it out and listen to it with much regularness. Simply put, it ROCKS. To be a little more descriptive, this is very much in the Math Rock vein, with off-kilter syncopations and odd-length phrasings and so on, but with a firm emphasis on the Rock part as well. To contrast, I never got into Don Caballero that much because their stuff can be too focused on the math part, and end up feeling almost clinical. Unwound, one of my other very favorite bands, might be a better comparison except that Jetpack is less dark and grungy/metally (metallic?). Not that Jetpack would ever jam, heavens no. Every riff is repeated exactly as many times as necessary for you to get your head around it, and then the song moves on. The volume or tempo shifts in that way that I love, building and falling and building again so you can barely sit still, like good early Mogwai but without the feedback, if that makes any sense. And I almost forgot to mention - these guys were fucking tight as tupperware. Unbelievable.

Okay, enough talk. No guilt about sharing these tracks since the guys have made them available on the Sampson site, and I'm sure the cd is essentially impossible to buy. (The Jetpack on Amazon is a different one.) So get the tracks from them, or over at Multiply, or zipped up, and let me know what you think.