Jacuzzi Boys - Ping Pong

Pitchfork 66

The fourth full-length by Miami trio Jacuzzi Boys begins with frontman/guitarist Gabriel Alcala imagining a feeling of intoxication from leaving the house while carrying a knife: “These days, everything’s too nice/Walk around, it’s another day/Goin’ out with my lucky blade.” If he has an issue with things being too prettied-up for his liking, he still chose to express himself with a song drenched in a polished, edgeless sheen. And other than a stylized hint of violence, the song’s psychedelic pop exterior and trailing “oohs” leave us with no deeper an impression than a passing daydream.

It’s not like Ping Pong’s sound de-fangs the passion of Jacuzzi Boys, but there’s certainly no sense of danger or even friction hidden in the album’s grooves. In strictly musical terms, Alcala’s smooth vocal facility gave him a “mature” aura early on in Jacuzzi Boys’ career. These days, he’s developed into a more-than-capable singer. The problem is when he asks, “Do you feel what I feel?/I feel it every day,” he doesn’t give us any inkling of what he’s feeling, nor does he really entice us to figure it out.

If Alcala and his bandmates consider their music a kind of blade that protects them and serves as their sword against generic uniformity, they need to be more honest with themselves about how unthreatening their music actually is. The band’s name conjures images of party times in frothing hot tubs, but the music itself has a richness of mood that’s sold short by the band’s vacant imagery, which even had a hint of daft charm when Jacuzzi Boys were barely out of their teens. Now in their early-to-mid thirties, the subject matter has them sounding stuck.

On “Can’t Fight Forever,” Alcala sings, “I don’t know how I really feel/Sometimes it’s really hard to feel,” over a slinking groove that bassist Danny Gonzales and drummer Diego Monasterios deliver with an impeccable balance of push and reserve. You can close your eyes and picture huge crowds bopping hard to the song, but the resignation that underpins and deflates it is actually alarming. “Sometimes, when I’m not fine,” Alcala continues, “I go looking for a cool time/Waking up is a such a trip/Like the sound of a hard whip.”

It’s just that Alcala sounds no more impassioned singing about attraction than he does about antifreeze. When he manages to deliver lines that at least have the potential to intrigue or provoke—“Girls like love and boys like blood” is a phrase Gonzales would repeat to his mother as a child—he and the band squander that potential by making you feel as if their understanding of human behavior derives entirely from 1980s music videos.

Jacuzzi Boys started trading-in their traditionalist garage-rock approach for slickness with their second album, 2011’s Glazin. At times, they’ve come close to straight synthpop. But they’ve navigated that change without actually watering down their music—something so many other bands have failed at. Not unlike the Dandy Warhols did over a three-album run from 1997 to 2003, Jacuzzi Boys have already proven they can keep their feet in guitar-driven rock and pop while maintaining their balance, which would suggest ample possibilities for future work.

Unfortunately, their sun-zapped slacker outlook drags them back, miscasting themselves as a modern-day answer to hollow, overly attitude-conscious acts like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. They don’t have to. As a rock band swimming against Miami’s dance and Latin currents, surely they have more interesting stories they can tell us. Their own music deserves it.