Jumbling Towers: "Kanetown"

At first superficial listen, Jumbling Towers could be said to fall into a few subsets of quirk-rock bands whose tendency is to accentuate their difference rather than get subtle and find sameness. Given that the band is betting big on their new single, “Kanetown,” one thinks that they’d be pulling out all of the stops, spitting hyperbolic syllables and evoking grand, performative gestures in a bid for recognition by a marketplace already as torrentially noisy as Niagara Falls.

Which makes “Kanetown”—with its three restrained movements and memorable, cyclical vocal melodies—both a memorable listen and exactly the move that elicits talk of maturation. They still sound like they’ve found that sweet spot between the Unicorns’ adolescent buoyancy and Islands’ boring aimlessness, but you won’t hear Nick Thorburn singing “There’s no higher ground to find here” with this kind of simplicity, or setting up a song’s inexorable march for a lovely key change in its final section.

Jumbling Towers are still that quintessential story of a band struggling for the attention of an overstimulated listener base whose choices now number in the gajillions. The difference is that their music is accomplished and fun to listen to precisely because it lacks the desperation of our post-millennial “music-as-brand-as-self” existence. This is confident, consummate stuff, well-worth checking out.

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