Roxy Jones | Lullabies & Warcries

Most Likely To: make you stay in a shitty city a little longer.

When I moved to San Diego, I found myself lost in a T.G.I. Friday’s that seemed never to end. The grimy sunbeam of fortune that once drove Tom Waits to search for the heart of Saturday night had been strip-mined, refinished and thoroughly scrubbed of everything that might have once identified it as a city unique unto itself.

This gentrified fleece covered everything from the restaurants to the bars to the venues that are supposedly the home of defiant thoughts and events. Once I thought myself savvy to everything that this region of the country had to offer, once I thought myself to be totally fucking over it before it even began, but very recently I have found bits and pieces of sincerity that make me believe that there might just be something worthwhile to this place after all.

Roxy Jones falls squarely into the category of things that make me want to give San Diego another chance. Lullabies & Warcries is proof that there is more to this city than getting trends on a four year time delay from the east coast.

Stylistically, the band deserves credit on two fronts. First, they don’t sound like a castrated supergroup combining James Mercer with members of Anathallo and The Walkmen (immediately setting them apart from roughly 90% of SoCal indie bands). Second, the path trod on Lullabies & Warcries listens almost like an alternate reality – one in which the aesthetic wrought by Burst & Bloom-era Cursive, American Football, and Grandaddy never got co-opted by Apple Computers or anyone under the age of 19. Roxy Jones were at that Sunny Day Real Estate show, they were also with you at that Mock Orange house party, but instead of growing up and getting boring like you fucking did, they got drunk and kept it fucking real.

An overall application of the finer points of the aesthetic described best suits any interpretation of Lullabies & Warcries. This is true both in quality and in failure. Roxy Jones clearly have room to grow, occasionally falling victim to obvious signs of the overall equation that they haven’t fully grasped yet. The first minute of “Speedway” sounds like the kind of shit many of us tried to pass off as music when we were 16 and still figuring out how to wear a cardigan. “Fluid Sharing” sounds like the same asshole that sang “Speedway” when he was 16, just several years later and on a real trail of dead kick lately. But shit, the only real reason why any of this criticism really rears its head is because of the fact that I’m guilty of the same bullcockery in years past. Hell, most of us are (admit it, you jerks.)

The real value of Roxy Jones comes into sight on tracks like “Wyatthead” and “Downtown Tokyo”, where we get to hear what would have happened if all of the bands from that magical time in music stayed under the radar and gestated into something greater than a northeastern memory. Truly, most of Lullabies & Warcries is spent beating your fucking ass and reminding you that wearing your heart on your sleeve doesn’t necessarily have to entail cutting off your dick. For the greatest portion of Lullabies, the band is delightfully ragged, furious in their own delivery. They do a service to the city of San Diego as much as they do music at large, holding a torch for legitimacy now past in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

So as worthwhile of an investment as both Lullabies and Roxy Jones are, the greatest contribution that they are to make is sure to be coming sometime soon. Not just musically, although I do see important things down the road for them as they soldier on, but in simultaneously defining and maintaining a sound and a portrait of a region that will one day hold respect in circles outside of itself.

Visit Roxy Jones’ Soundcloud page to stream Lullabies & Warcries.