I will never not love a good music video.
I have always enjoyed watching them since I was little. Whether the video had good visuals, a storyline, or dancing, I would watch them for hours at a time.
When I kept seeing small clips of the music video from Jungle’s song “Back On 74” on TikTok, I was immediately interested and went to watch the entire thing; I was entranced. The whole video was one take without any cuts, and it was all dancing choreographed by Shay Latukolan. The dancers were mesmerizing, and it fits with the funky music perfectly.
The song “Back On 74” is the sixth track on Jungle’s newest album, Volcano. The song is incredibly catchy and scratches an itch in my brain every time I hear it. The vocals, paired with the retro musicality, are absolutely perfect. Because of how much I loved this song and the video for it, along with the fact that I like some of the band’s other music, I checked out the rest of the album.
Let’s just say that the only memorable song in the album is track six.
Now, the album is not terrible, but it just felt incredibly repetitive. In many of the songs, the vocals are so tampered with that I could barely understand a word that they were singing. It sounded like nonsense to me. Maybe it’s just not my style of music, but I do not like songs like “Don’t Play” one bit. It was the same incoherent lyrics the entire song, and the lyricism in this certain song had little to no versatility and variety.
Normally, I love to dissect the music I review so that I can better understand and emotionally connect to what I am listening to. With this album, the band is singing straight nonsense that is so muffled that it is nearly impossible to decipher what exactly they are singing about. I am a sucker for songs with emotion, and this album did not have what I was looking for.
There were things that I did enjoy about Volcano, though. The melodies of the songs gave strong hints of disco and 70s music. This, paired with some more contemporary components, made some of the songs quite interesting to listen to. Along with that, the ends of the first four tracks on the album melt into the beginning of the next song, which I absolutely love. It is like listening to one long song with different emotions being portrayed in each part.
Volcano was neither amazing nor terrible. There was simply very little variety and far too much repetition to keep me entertained for 44 minutes. Most of the songs I cannot listen to all the way through before skipping them since it is just the same thing over and over again. For this album, I’ll stick to listening to their most popular track and let the rest of the songs slip out of my memory. I only like to remember the greats.
