jj - n° 3

 I was a total sucker for jj’s debut offering, nº 2. Part of the appeal was the aesthetic—an embodiment of what LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy called “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’80s”—a more faithful approximation of that decade’s music than anything Alan Palomo has ever written. More importantly, the melodies were pretty much undeniable. And while much was made of jj’s particularly smoked-out brand of dream-pop, it was those melodies that made nº 2 one of the best records of 2009.

nº 3 succeeds in recreating at least half of that formula. The sound, equal parts ’80s and international, is largely unchanged; the songs on nº 3 supposedly came from the same sessions that produced nº 2. As before, jj sample a variety of disparate sources, expanding Weezy’s chorus from The Game’s “My Life” into a sparse piano ballad before dropping an Italian commentator’s call of a Zlatan Ibrahimovic goal in the middle of “Into the Light.” The lilting Caribbean polyrhythms, tribal percussion and shimmery synths figure just as prominently here as on nº 2. It’s an enticing blend, simultaneously accessible and eclectic at a time when many of their contemporaries have trouble deciding for which adjective to strive.

Ironically, jj reveal the importance of those melodies by giving us an album largely devoid of them. The moments of trippy transcendence of nº 2—“Ecstasy,” “Are You Still in Vallda?”—are sorely lacking here. Even the album’s best tracks are noticeably flawed: “Voi Parlate, Io Gioco” is a pretty obvious rework of “Masterplan,” while “Let Go” is undone by a seriously out-of-place harmonica. There’s enough shiny packaging to make nº 3 worthwhile, but it fails to recreate the ethereal heights of its predecessor.