If it seems a bit dramatic for Jail Weddings to title their second album Meltdown — A Declaration of Unpopular Emotion, one only need hit play to see why the title is apt. The Los Angeles-based nonet (count ’em: nine) employs all manner of instruments and a small choir’s worth of voices to unfurl their dark rock’n’roll epics, which are most often led by the quaking baritone of doomsayer Gabriel Hart.
Imagine the Bad Seeds and the Shagri-Las sparring to the bitter end while the shifting music scores every victory or loss in real time. Below you can hear “Why Is It So Hard to Be Good,” a track both brooding and triumphant, which, duh, wrestles with the human inclination to do wrong in the face of righteous logic. Meltdown arrives August 27 via Neurotic Yell. Hart calls it “a dissection of the personal apocalypse.”
