Never News: Music

Jonah Matranga - There's A Lot In Here

Jonah, the reason rock and roll was invented



Another recent release that I'm hooked on is this little beauty.

I'm saddened, actually, that I fell so far out of the Jonah/Oneline loop that I didn't know this thing was coming out. Back when Jonah was known as Onelinedrawing, my buddy Brecon put on some mp3's while he was packing up clothes at his at-the-time empty childhood home. I was instantly amazed—and, shortly thereafter, I had a copy of Visitor and Sketchy #2, (thanks to Jonah's unique and infamous sliding scale/'pick yr price' sells technique) and couldn't stop playing them—or the mass of Mp3's I had slowly been collecting.

It was only recently when Jonah decided to drop the Oneline moniker and step into the role of himself-as-name. I was a little disquieted by this news (kind of like the news that David Bazan is no longer Pedro the Lion), but not entirely turned off to the idea. Jonah is a rock god, as both this DVD/CD combo and myself (I saw him one night at Kilby Court a few summers ago [three? Three years ago? Brecon had yet to leave on his mission; Mark, #2, and I had gone to Salt Lake to catch The Dismemberment Plan with my brother, Stanton—which, of course, was kind of a we-might-as-well-because-we're-going-to-see-Oneline type experience that, ideally, rooted that weekend as one of the best show-going experiences of my life—and met Brecon, Tucker, and co. there] can attest to. He has the ability to completely disarm you, taking the 'star' quality away from good-ol' rock shows; his stories about his friends and kid interrupted nearly every song and, in turn, every song tore us to shreds with its integrity.

This record came out last week, I think—or maybe a week or two before that—and features a DVD highlighting two concerts and music videos for the whole of The Volunteers. The CD is a compilation live tracks from those shows both with and without the backing band.

I have to go ahead and say that Jonah has been a mainstay in my record collection for as long as I can honestly had a collection—or taste in music, for that matter—and, it seems, he will be for a long time to come. Every song is the precise combination of goofy and soulful and each recording is scalding in its honesty.

(Also, tooling around the Revalation and Equal Vision pages for these links is sort of like a who's who of my self-professed 'emo' days. And those were fucking great days.)


Lukewarm (Mp3, from 'There's a Lot In Here')

posted by Colin Reed Moon @ 2:25 PM