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Artist
The Voodoo Jets
4+ albums
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Review by Jo-Ann Greene They are a power pop trio. But wait: these guys rock without a guitar! Now that's pretty damn cool. Check out the soaring lead on the intro to the David Bowie-esque "Spaceman," or even better, the riff that barrels through "Big Black Machine Gun" and the lead that sears the middle-break, classic rock in a far from classic rock mode. That's not a real guitar or a guitar sample, that's a piano! For the tech heads, Micah Sheveloff achieves the seemingly impossible by feeding his Rhodes piano through a Marshall amp, a wah-wah pedal, and a Roland AX-1 Controller. For music fans, all that may be a neat trick, but the proof of the pudding is in the actual sound, and Supersonic sounds, well, super. The Voodoo Jets may be coming at power pop from a unique angle, but in the end what's really important is they've given a new heft and warmth to a well-worn genre. The former comes not just from the trio's muscular rhythm section, but the weight of the piano and the wonderfully bottom heavy mix. The warmth, meanwhile, flows straight from Sheveloff's keyboards, as well as Dave Minehan's excellent production which wraps the band's sound in a slight blur of sonics that gives the whole set a "real music" analog feel. When Sheveloff isn't rocking it out like an escapee from a hair metal band, he's laying down elegant piano passages, as on "Cold Outside" (the violin on that piece is real), playing pretty melodies, best heard on "Faraway Star," creating sublime atmospher
