Hits the Fan Records are a label who pick their releases very carefully. JR Green’s Bring the Witch Doctor is only their third release (after Frightened Rabbit’s superb début Sing the Greys and Kathryn Joseph’s Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled, one of our favourite albums of 2015), a fact which hints at the sort of quality control in operation up there in Glasgow. Their latest release is Bring the Witch Doctor, an EP by the duo JR Green, a pair of brothers from Scotland named Jacob and Rory (hence the JR in the name).
According to their bio, JR Green use “accordion-riffed nostalgia and teenage angst acoustic guitar” to make songs which fall somewhere between traditional folk, early 00s indie and the raft of quality Scottish songwriters from the last decade or so. For example opener ‘Nigerian Princess’ channels the likes of Withered Hand and Second Hand Marching Band to produce a song at once knowing and naive, sentimental and self-aware, that millennial blend of knowing both too much and too little at the same time.
“She makes me walk across the Congo where F.G.M and hungers all the rage.
And all these nihilist with firearms trying to slay the Milky Way.And why can’t you see there’s real need in me?
I’m sorry for my output I’m surrounded by wankers, I’m only seventeen
And I don’t have all the answers yet”
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‘Do the Katie-Step’ is almost like a stripped-back song from The Libertines song is they were devoid of smarmy swagger, a tale of a romantic British youth from a wannabe likely lad (“I wanna go where the young men fight, I wanna be the type of guy the thin girls like”). ‘The Gentleman’s Apocalypse’ is a different sort of track entirely, sounding like Organ Fight-era Frightened Rabbit. This is a song about love with a physical weight, a feeling not limited to the head and the heart but to the more functional organs too – the viscera, the skin, the liver, lungs and bones. The track is desperate, hot and young, a matter of life and death too large to contain within words and chords but what else is there to do?
“This is your love song, I hope it will suffice”
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‘They All Know Something’ feels more triumphant, with bright strummed acoustic guitar and harmonious vocals on the chorus of “All my problems, all my feelings / They all know something that we don’t” highlighting a sunnier side to an already diverse EP. The variation on Bring The Witch Doctor suggests the band could take numerous directions in future release, and it’ll be exciting to see where they choose to go.
‘The Gentleman’s Apocalypse’ single is out on Valentine’s Day, and you can buy Bring the Witch Doctor from Hits the Fan Records on CD, cassette or digital download.
