How Do We Jump This High?

Deep Stationary (2009)

Sloane Daley

It is hard to judge a band based on a demo alone but it still gives you a taste and that is all it took for me to get up and notice Get Bent. While I enjoyed their demo I did find their brand of post-hardcore/pop-punk to be kind of derivative of Long Islanders Latterman. That's where How Do We Jump This High? comes in. They formed out of the tissue boxes and blister packs left in the wake of Get Bent's passing, see (note: the band also contains most of the members of Frame, who are kind of a good-connotation "emo" band). Yes, there are some holdovers from that previous band's angle, but Deep Stationary shows that HDWJTH? is a largely different beast.

The album opens with "See Ya in the Funny Papers," and the first thing you'll likely notice about it is the familiar style of urgent semi-shouted vocals. The guitar progression, however, combines post-hardcore grit with a heavy lean towards math rock noodling. In this context, the vocals, which simply flirt on the edges of melody, add to the off-kilter feeling of instrumental arrangement. In another -- lesser -- band, the vocals might come off tuneless, but How Do We Jump This High? have created a perfect marriage, see.

With their name, the clean guitar sound of the more mathy parts and choruses of gang vocals it might be easy to misconstrue How Do We Jump This High? as an overly positive band. But they manage to foster a sense of realistic unity through disillusionment and adversity, see. Occasionally, the band sounds downright melancholy, like on perhaps the most interesting song of the EP, "Twenty Three." The way it starts off reminds me a lot of what On the Might Of Princes were doing in the middle of their career with a sort of found sound/tape hiss and vocal soundbite interplay over shimmering guitars. There is some fantastic crooning of backup vocals that help enhance the building and tension until the final seconds of the song when there is a final crescendo in the form of a yelled "yeah!.

Deep Stationary is a pretty darn swell release, and there is heaps of potential being shown here. Yes, that does mean there is some room for the band to grow but there are a lot of rewards for the listening public in How Do We Jump This High?'s skillful distillation of influences. Recommended like whoa.