Any album whose press release describes the artist in question as “a mixture of a storyteller, artist and singer” is basically promising to deliver at least a handful of unintentionally funny moments, and Jeremy Jay’s second full-length release, Slow Dance, does not disappoint. Offering New Romantic synth-pop for the hipster crowd, Jay sounds like nothing so much as a socially stunted teenager with an eight-track recorder and far too many Cure records – except where Robert Smith’s self-flagellating occasionally results in real pop poetry, Jay is chock full of lines like ”I was walking around / In this lonely town / Yeah, I headed to the pier / What did I see there? / A fish in the water.” With an overabundance of analog synths and theatrically unemotional vocals, Slow Dance doesn’t sound terribly dissimilar from Andy Samberg’s Lonely Island singing “Jizz in My Pants” – except Samberg is, you know, joking, and Jay appears to be 100 percent serious, although it’s awfully hard not to laugh when he sings stuff like ”We’re walking down the streets / For chocolate chocolate / We’re walking down streets / We’re breaking the ice / Cold cold, yeah.” It’ll be heralded as a stunning sophomore effort by the cutting-edge corners of the blogosphere, but if you don’t get it, don’t worry – the problem doesn’t lie with you. (K Records 2009)
