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Graduation Day
Jr. High overcomes a near break-up to find salvation in power-pop and release a long-awaited debut album. BY RICHARD MARTIN
rmartin@wweek.com Sean Croghan sits outside a downtown coffeeshop, his guitar by his side. The black knit cap that he's almost always wearing pulls at the lines of his face; his ice-blue eyes stare toward a sunlit street. For the first time in six years, the singer and guitarist has a new album to talk about, and he seems by turns content, excited, anxious and exhausted. "It feels really incredible," he says, ruminating on Jr. High's just-released Killer of Friendships (eMpTy). "Last week I felt like I'd been drinking tons and tons of caffeine all day long. I was just shaking." The band's debut almost never materialized. Jr. High formed in 1994 as a power-pop excursion led by a bunch of Portland punk and rock veterans. Along with Croghan, whose frenetic and explosive Crackerbash released several records in the early '90s, the group also featured ex-Calamity Jane bassist Joanna Bolme, Quasi's Janet Weiss and hardcore acolyte Dan Hawthorne. Poised to become one of this city's buzz bands, the quartet began to unravel in 1996 as the musicians focused on other projects. Weiss joined the rising star known as Sleater-Kinney, Bolme toured with the Spinanes and Hawthorne started Kayo. By '97, Croghan was all that remained of Jr. High. But in the midst of this dissolution, the musicians managed to record the album, with ex-Atomic 61 drummer Paul Pulvirenti replacing an already-departed Weiss. He ended up rescuing the band. "I had decided that once we were finished recording, that was going to be it," Croghan says. "Paul said the songs were strong enough that they deserved a chance to have a life of their own. He said, 'Sean, basically you are Jr. High.'" Croghan says he chose the name because junior high school was "when I figured out that people weren't all nice." The songs he writes for the band explore this realization in painful detail, capturing the rage, awkwardness, romantic stirrings and hopes of youth. In the hands of fresh-faced songwriters, such emotions are often expressed in one-dimensional terms like "You fucked me over, bitch" or, as Green Day's Billy Joe so flatly puts it in his current hit, "I think I had the time of my life." Croghan, who's in his early 30s, brings abundant perspective: He's seen lovers come and go, and he's watched as contemporaries and friends such as Nirvana and Elliott Smith became media personalities while other peers died from drug overdoses or had their dreams shattered. Rather than scream about life's inequities, Croghan sings in a clipped and emotive style, hitting each word as if it's the bar of a xylophone. It's a dramatic contrast from his days in Crackerbash, when he'd shriek and yelp his way through a song, and it showcases a newfound appreciation of pop craft and vocals. "You have to be more careful and pay more attention to language," he says. "You can express things really easily in screaming, but if you're trying to sing, you have to be more thoughtful and have some artistry to it as well." From the first line on the album, "Don't go hiding behind kisses/Now you're playing hard to forget," Croghan exhibits a wily brand of wordplay that's suited to the band's rollicking, hook-filled tunes. Both on record and on stage--where bassist Brendan Welsh and guitarist David Alspaugh now round out the band--Jr. High blurs the lines in pop's framework, taking a well-articulated bitterness and setting it to bouncy bass lines, guitar riffs that run the gamut from raw to refined, and pliable drumming with hints of jazz. The quartet can slip into a lolling blues-inflected song like "Brian's Pain" or crank the volume for a full-speed-ahead rave-up such as "Storm Warning" or "Writer's Song." At a recent performance, Croghan unveiled another direction for Jr. High, performing a soulful duet with local diva Tahoe Jackson. Ever the showman, he dropped to his knees for the song's rousing crescendo, looking something like James Brown's illegitimate white son and singing his heart out. "That's part of the evolution of the band," Croghan says of the soul injection. "It was always something we intended to have there, but the band is starting to understand the music a little better. I listen to a lot of '60s soul stuff, and a lot of it was via Britain, whether it was Them or the Rolling Stones or the Jam. It's starting to come out more, and the ideas are becoming more clear." It's also becoming clear that Jr. High has graduated from the shaky period following its formation to achieve exactly what Croghan wanted from the outset. Drawing from his punk background, he's a preacher in a power-pop band, and that's the way he likes it. "I'm taking punk ideas and putting them in a format that I'm not used to using," he says. "There's a lot of people who are excellent at it: John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and the Clash. They make it very listenable. You don't have to be the Dead Kennedys to make social commentary." |
