Be it audio or video, JABE is still best taken live

By Jamie Perkins,

Well, JABE has pretty much done it again. Their new CD, "Drama City," is full of the same type of inspired alt-country and mellower, contemplative ballads that fans of the seacoast band have come to expect. Fronted by award-winning songwriter Jabe Beyer (with Jay Aucella on bass, Dave Westner on drums, and multi-instrumentalist Sean Staples), JABE is fast becoming the band to watch in these parts.

"Drama City," the band's third disc, is a two-disc extravaganza; one disc of songs and one of extras, including three videos, three MP3's, and a direct link to their Web site, www.jabe.net. The sometimes grainy videos sound excellent and successfully portray the energy JABE carries out in their live shows. The extra songs in MP3 format are basically just humorous little ditties that display JABE's obvious knack for not taking themselves too seriously.

The audio disc, however, displays JABE's obvious knack for hook-laden, country-tinged rock. Beyer is without question one of the best songwriters north of Boston, but the success of JABE depends as much on the rest of the band as it does on his exceptional songwriting, a notion Beyer himself seems to lampoon in the MP3 end-of-the-night track, "It's Time To Go". After all, they provide an energy and atmosphere that helps Beyer's songs remain as fluid and enjoyable as they are. While Aucella and Westner provide the low-end foundation, Staples supplies background vocals, as well as pulling out banjo, mandolin, fiddle, or a second guitar to augment the sound as needed for each song. The result is that each song has its own distinctive sound, despite the fact that Beyer's songwriting hasn't necessarily changed or branched into new territory since their last CD, the fantastic "Outback Country Vampires." And, in fairness to Beyer, it didn't really need to; his songs work just as well on "Drama City" as they did n "Outback" (though on a personal level, I do miss the fiddle melodies that were more prevalent on "Outback").

The boys seem cranked up this time around, though, as a number of these songs are uptempo, careening, and almost on the verge of being chaotic, and only get more so in the live videos on the second disc. This relative anarchy could possibly be attributed to Beyer and Staples' moonlighting in the Newgrass outfit The Benders, a project that is just as superb artistically and musically (and one could assume, as a result, just as satisfying for the artists), but is far more subdued than JABE. There is certainly no shortage of slower, introspective numbers on "Drama City," however. The truth is that the songs, fast and rollicking or slow and thoughtful, are all examples of well-wrought songcraft.

Beyer's lyrics are often relationship oriented, and always strong in melody and heart. Occasionally a romantically sympathetic speaker clashes with an oversexed one, but this provides more of an emotional landscape to wander over. No one listens to an artist who isn't somewhat paradoxical anyway. Quite simply, JABE are coming up with some of the best music around, and seems like they're having an awful lot of fun doing it. One hopes they are naïve enough to keep going; my favorite track on the CD was "Into A Wall", a song which manages to reveal the frustration of every working musician out there in about two hyper minutes, and ending that frustration by various forms of cartoonish suicide. "I made twenty-four dollars tonight/ At the local watering hole/ I'm gonna leave this bar, get right in my car/ And drive right into a wall." Sadly, a sentiment that every band and singer has felt numerous times. Hopefully JABE can forego the way of Princess Grace and stay alive long enough to receive the appreciation they are so righteously playing for.