Vulfpeck: The Joy of Music, The Job of Real Estate review – a disappointing Jekyll and Hyde

I’m tempted to say that it’s been a long two years since Vulfpeck’s last album, Hill Climber, but the truth is it really hasn’t. 2019 and 2020 have seen the Michigan funk legends take something of a hiatus, with a host of new albums from individuals. Guitarist Cory Wong has released no less than five new albums of catchy, if somewhat synthetic-sounding old-school funk, as well as an onslaught of six live albums recorded from everywhere from Amsterdam to Glasgow to Sydney – I’m surprised Cory’s notorious rubber wrists are still intact. Multi-instrumentalist Theo Katzman has grown to be one of my favourite songwriters with a new album earlier this year, showcasing a less-obviously Vulf blend of rock and country music. Even the enigmatic keyboardist Woody Goss has been releasing new music, first with a brilliant set of jazz-ified Vulfpeck tunes in A Very Vulfy Christmas, before joining Jeremy Daly and May Erlewine respectively on the listen-worthy albums Strange Satisfaction and Anyway. And that’s not to mention the seminal moment of the band’s career last year when they became the second independent band ever to sell out the 17,000-seat Madison Square Garden, a recording of which remains available online and continues to be a subject of worship for virtually all Vulfpeck fans that watch it. After all that, plus the small matter of a pandemic interrupting the writing of a new album, it’s a small miracle that bandleader Jack Stratton has managed to release the ten new tracks on JOMJRE over the last few months.

Vulfpeck start the album strongly with the intriguing Bach Vision Test, leading into the opening single 3 on E. The former track may be hard listening for some – a synth fugue is not typical of Vulfpeck’s most popular tracks – but it is nonetheless competently written and best enjoyed with the accompanying video, where you can follow the lines of melodies as they weave in and out of one another before reaching a satisfying sliding cadence to finish. The transition into 3 on E feels very similar to the beginning of 2016’s The Beautiful Game, where a stunning clarinet solo primed listeners for the astronomic single Animal Spirits. In comparison, the opening to JOMJRE is a poor attempt to recreate one of my favourite album openings of all time, perhaps largely down to the mediocre, straight-forward funk of 3 on E. It’s a fun tune, and Antwaun Stanley’s inclusion is greatly appreciated after his absence in the last album, but really there’s not much going for it besides a strong groove and Woody Goss playing the ocarina on occasion.

Certainly for the first five tracks on JOMJRE, the band just keeps getting better and better. The joyous Radio Shack encapsulates everything I love about Vulfpeck: it’s fun, light-hearted and more than worthy of being 90s sitcom theme music, with Katzman deserving extra praise for a technically-impressive lead guitar part. It’s a song with Goss’ songwriting fingerprints all over, who is in my view the best songwriter in the band, and the man behind such hits as Dean Town and Fugue State. LAX is the track that follows, and somehow it’s even better. Joey Dosik’s soulful vocals (and sax) make for an unforgettable and tight little pop track, complete with a key change and endlessly looped final chorus which makes the most of one of the most infectious vocal hooks of the year. Without exaggeration, LAX may be the band’s best song since Animal Spirits.

After the release of LAX in early September wrapped up the first half of the album, things were starting to feel a little too good to be true. Perhaps the fun, paradise world of Vulfpeck songs – which never reference politics or current events – was simply unable to be disrupted by the coronavirus. But then we realised Vulfpeck had only written five new songs for JOMJRE… Poinciana is a joke vocoder cover of the jazz standard released several years ago; Eddie Buzzsaw is just 2017’s dud Vulf Pack coated in delay and with Eddie Barbash’s grating sax over the top of it; Something is a live Beatles cover from three years ago, with the ‘legendary’ drummer Bernard Purdie excruciatingly not used to his full potential; Santa Baby is Woody Goss’ take on the standard, and has deservedly been a fan favourite since its YouTube release in 2017. It could be worse, but – for a Vulfpeck album – not by much. There was a growing sense of despair amongst Vulfpeck’s vibrant online fanbase as one by one the B-side quietly trickled out. Poinciana is dull, Eddie Buzzsaw is forgettable, Something will put you to sleep, and not in a good way. For the fanbase, it would have been easier to take had the album not been billed as such a big release, and indeed Stratton reveled in vinyl sales during the heady weeks of the Radio Shack and LAX releases, not revealing that half of the record would in fact be recycled material. 

For a while it seemed like the much-anticipated final track would be another example of Stratton swindling more money with questionable ethics. A typically eccentric piece to camera posted on YouTube in August revealed that Vulfpeck would be selling Track 10 to the highest bidder on eBay, in keeping with the album’s ‘real estate’ theme. As Stratton was sure to point out, Track 10 is a big deal; crowd favourite Cory Wong and the unforgettable It Gets Funkier IV (which happens to include one of the finest Joe Dart bass solos of them all) are both notable Track 10s from albums past. The reveal that Stratton would be donating the money to music workshops for children calmed the occasional irate commenter complaining about all the money they’d be getting, but nonetheless I was upset to find that a vocalised follow-up to 2018’s fantastic Disco Ulysses (Instrumental) would have to wait (every Vulfpeck album must only be 10 songs long). The eventual buyer of the track was Earthquake Lights, a five-piece indie rock band from New York that inexplicably had $70,000 spare to splurge on a publicity stunt that they are no doubt praying will launch their career. The trouble is that the song they submitted just isn’t that good. The sombre piano and sweeping strings section screams Bond theme, but unfortunately some painfully mediocre vocals don’t seem up to the challenge. As an Earthquake Lights single it’s passable and well-written, but as a Vulfpeck song it’s a real disappointment. There are no little nods to the plethora of Vulfpeck in-jokes which the fans would have lapped up, no sense of fun which the band exudes constantly, no groove (you can’t even hear the bass!). Stratton himself evidently had no control over what the track would sound like, but I would have hoped for something that sounded a little bit more like it was written by someone willing to give a bubbly funk band $70,000.

In many ways you can’t blame Vulfpeck for what they’ve done on JOMJRE – the five new songs are consistently good, and writing the remaining five was understandably tricky. Nevertheless, Stratton has done more recycling than Greta Thunberg in pulling out obscure cuts from the YouTube channel into the limelight, and it’s tempting to speculate how great the album would have been if they’d have waited until post-Covid and written a second half that was as good as the first. As divided as its name suggests, JOMJRE includes some of Vulfpeck’s best and worst tracks of all time, and like many things in 2020, it’s left me dreaming of what could have been.