22 Jacks Confident of Their ‘Uncle Bob’

*** 22 JACKS

“Uncle Bob”

side1DUMMY

You couldn’t beat Joyride for pop songs with punk zoom, unless, perhaps, you were listening to One Hit Wonder. But Joyride broke up last year, and half of the Orange County band, singer-guitarist Steve Soto and drummer Sandy Hansen, is now in 22 Jacks, backing up front man Joe Sib, former singer of the Los Angeles band Wax.

22 Jacks is no Joyride, but it is good enough to prove that well-turned pop melody and a revving punk attack is a winning combination in the right hands. That’s a proposition in need of repeated proof, given the abundance of mediocre practitioners out there chirping and pummeling in the wake of the Offspring/Green Day commercial explosion.

Sib, who writes with Soto and several other collaborators, has a knack for memorable melodic hooks. The band, driven by the mighty Hansen (now credited under his birth name, Sandy Hancock), blazes with assurance. It also avoids the main pitfall of punk-pop, a numbing sameness of approach that can lead a band like Face to Face to take a strength--a knack for fast-paced anthems, say--and turn it into a drawback through endless repetition.

22 Jacks finds some alternative ways to be alternative. “Things to Come”--with a title harking back to the Yardbirds, Hancock’s Keith Moonish surf-beat drumming and ensemble “whoa-oh” harmonies--takes its cues from the first style of music ever labeled “punk”--not the Ramones and Sex Pistols of 1976 but a bunch of raw, deliciously primitive garage bands circa ’66.

When Sib and company do look to ‘76, it’s not just to the Pistols but also to Graham Parker, whose earliest albums, with their R&B-inflected;, spitfire rock, are the apparent inspiration for “Newspapers and Cigarettes.”

Moving along through the ‘70s in search of ways to shake free from the punk-pop formula, 22 Jacks hit upon Elvis Costello’s reggae-noir hit, “Watching the Detectives,” which is here transmogrified into the instrumental “Stockton.” It would have been a nice joke if kept to a fragment; it bogs down as a full-length track.

Lyrically, Sib and company succumb to one of punk-pop’s standard practices, delivering songs that are only sparse, oblique snippets of emotional experience. The themes are usually worthy takes on facing adversity or fighting off depression, but these sturdy bones need more flesh. Joyride’s excellence had a lot to do with creating narratives and scenarios that gave you a three-minute movie instead of a collection of vague snapshots. 22 Jacks is off to a good start, but next time it should draw more on that know-how.

(Available from side1DUMMY Recordings, 6201 Sunset Blvd., Suite 211, Hollywood, CA 90028; (213) 951-9090; e-mail: Side1@aol.com.)

Albums are rated on a scale of * (poor) to **** (excellent), with *** denoting a solid recommendation.