Music in its purest form makes the listener reminisce , It takes them back to a place in time. It conjures up emotions that had since been forgotten. They can relate to the lyrics, the melodies, the mood. It makes them feel.
Jim Pullman’s latest work “Jackals and Wolves” does an impeccable job of this.
Jackals and Wolves aims for Jim Pullman at his most essential and honest. Its a snapshot of a rockstar unresolved, meandering a lonesome landscape of hard truths and attractive wrong answers
The fruit of a year's worth of recording and even more time spent writing,
The result is a seamless body of work, combining modern power pop with the friendly familiarity of easy '90s rock, at times reminiscent of bands like R.E.M. Made ominous by spacey guitars and mournful pedal steel, the mood of the music matches Pullman's theme of loss and returns to his songwriting roots, tapping into more personal subject matter.
The album kicks off with whooshing air and guitar squeals giving way to Revolving Door, a strong rock song with a hook suggesting the best of Oasis, and rallies to an end with righteous guitar soloing punctuated by slams of grand piano. Then follows You Don’t Dump the Boys, They Just Lose Their Turn, an odd, sardonic track recalling The Turtles’ Happy Together, were it frolicking with the gleeful madness of an anxious and hopeless bar patron
Sonically, the album lends a more lonesome tone than previous releases, although it’s the band’s the most dynamic and well-arranged. Providing the record’s most lofty and dramatic moments, Levitate opens with a flowing and majestic string quartet
50 Paces seems inspired by the lonely road ballads of Bob Seger, with a spacey and atmospheric pedal steel by Bronson Bergeson. And not to be outdone by other songs’ twisted-yet-tender moments, the album closer Feather Soft Heart (#7) reconsiders the other songs’ hard-bitten realism. Between soft percussion breaks and hushed piano progressions, Jim posits the question that, if we could set aside the defensive sarcasm for a couple minutes, could we build the courage to consider what we had was pretty good all along?