Written By Cody Schwartz
Jeff the Brotherhood is a band worth supporting. They’re the kind of band that’ll drive out in their dingy old clunker of a van 500 miles to play to seven kids in your grimy basement on a night’s notice. They’d probably make it a party and you could probably pay them in beer.
Many have called them krautrock, but they’ve been one of my favorite new bands for a while now, and to my ears, this Nashville two-piece of real-life brothers are a lot more Wipers or The Spits than Faust or Neu!. Jeff the brotherhood’s new album We are the Champions sounds like a record by two dudes who grew up on ’77 punk, but recently got interested in experimenting with psychedelia in their parents’ basement – and I’m pretty sure that’s almost exactly what happened. JEFF have been making some of the fastest, loudest music out of Nashville, Tennessee for over a decade, and while their latest effort is a departure, it’s not all too radical.
From the moment you place your needle on the record, a few of those omnipresent radio hip-hop air horns sound off, leading into some pedal-heavy guitars. What follows is 35 minutes of some of JEFF’s most poignant, honest music - but don’t think that they’ve strayed too far from their winning combination of riffs and jokes (the first lyric belted on the record is “I’ve been thinking about your mom”).
Tracks like “Diamond Way” (which was previously released as the A-side of the wonderful JEFF/Ty Segall split 7” from last year) and “Endless Fire” perfectly illustrate the sort of newer, weirder, and slightly softer approach the band has taken with some of their songs. On the other hand, (ironically) “Cool Out” and “Mellow Out” among others keep the party rockin’ and do well to round out a multi-faceted record. “Wastoid”, the final song on the album, offers some more Jeff the Brotherhood underachiever humor and includes some awesome Motown-by-way-of-The-Ramones ‘oh-oh’s. We are the Champions is the kind of music that you can both blast at a party to get people’s feet moving, and use to score your walk home with headphones on at your most introspective moment. That is why, to me, it’s such a great record by an ever-evolving band.
If you like good times, illicit substances, heavy riffs, and torn up Bart Simpon shirts, or if you like quiet moments, more cerebral punk, and psychedelia, you should pick up this record and go see Jeff the Brotherhood on tour. They’re probably coming soon and they’re probably going to rule.
