Jaguar
This Time

Among the most representative bands of the new wave of British heavy metal, Jaguar released "Power Games" in 1983, their first album of orthodox metal with proto-speed metal incursions.

In 1984, setting aside (even in appearance) the armament of the die-hard metalhead, the band from Bristol released "This Time" for the metal-label Roadrunner.

"This Time" is a completely unexpected album and, in some fundamental aspects, unprecedented; a sort of middle ground (just to give an idea, albeit vague) between the early Del Amitri and Green Day-esque pop-punk. Except in 1984, Del Amitri hadn't yet recorded anything and Billy Joe Armstrong (singer of Green Day) was twelve years old.

From a strictly compositional point of view, the songs on the album have nothing experimental or particularly innovative. Absolutely quirky, however, is the almost "garage" attitude of the tracks, bright and melodic and yet characterized by a rough sound that has little or nothing to do with AOR (a label often used inappropriately to classify this record) or with certain overseas FM-Rock.

The vocals are clean, without any virtuosity or affectations, the rhythmic base is characterized by a constantly exploding drum sound, even in the slower tracks, and the guitar riffs, even when the pace picks up ("Last Flight", "Another Last Weekend"), are never dark or suffocating.

The effect is in some cases disorienting. In "Stand Up", in my opinion the least successful track on the album, for example, it's not clear where they wanted to go (metal? electro-pop? dance?), yet the album holds up well - despite its strange and unusual balance - almost for its entire duration, with few drops in tone ("Stand Up" and the repetitive "Stranger"). Out of place, however, is the concluding "(Nights of) Long Shadows" - a track of canonical heavy metal that recalls Saxon's "Strong Arm of the Law" - which hardly integrates with the rest of the record. Overall, it is a beautiful and original work - which with at least a couple of fewer tracks would have certainly gained in compactness and homogeneity - but too melodic for metal and too "noisy" for radio airplay. The ending is, alas, predictable: the album doesn't sell and Jaguar closes shop. They'll return about two decades later, without Paul Merrell on vocals, to resume the heavy metal path of their beginnings. But that's another story.