Photo by Eduard Poser
By the late ’00s, morale in the Milwaukee music scene was about as low as it had ever been. The whole scene was starved for recognition and desperate for a sign that somebody, anybody outside the city was paying attention. That sign finally arrived in 2009, when Sub Pop Records, one of the most esteemed of all the major indie labels, announced that it had signed a Milwaukee band, albeit one that even most Milwaukee music fans had never heard of: Jaill. The city cheered the news as if it’d been pushing for Jaill the whole time.
In hindsight, it seems a little silly and more than a little sad that the whole scene would pin such hopes to one band, especially one as esoteric as Jaill, whose plucky, intermittently psychedelic guitar-pop was never crafted with mass audiences in mind. But the signing really did mark a turning point for the Milwaukee music scene, signaling the end of its long rut. Local bands now sign to prominent labels and garner national interest so regularly that it’s no longer all that big of a deal when it happens. Things are better now.
Jaill hardly set the world on fire during their time on Sub Pop, so the band wasn’t surprised when the label opted against releasing a third album from them after the modest performance of their 2012 record Traps. Singer/guitarist Vinnie Kircher, the band’s one constant member, regards his time on the label with gratitude. Jaill was never going to do Shins numbers, but Sub Pop rescued them from obscurity, introducing them to audiences they were unlikely to find on their own. “It was a pretty good experience,” Kircher says. “I think people in the industry generally know Sub Pop as nice, fun, easy-to-work-with people.”
And Jaill didn’t go long without a home. For their latest album Brain Cream, the band partnered with California’s Burger Records, which had released their 2009 album There’s No Sky (Oh My My). In the half decade since, Burger has grown into one of the country’s preeminent garage-pop labels, offering releases by King Tuff, Diarrhea Planet, Colleen Green and dozens of other acts more aligned with Jaill’s sensibilities than most of the Sub Pop roster.
Brain Cream marks a new beginning for the band. It’s their first with their current lineup featuring Surgeons in Heat singer Jonathan Mayer on guitar, Fatty Acids singer Josh Evert on drums and former John the Savage leader Mike Skorcz on keyboards, and also their first recorded away from Milwaukee. The band zipped down to Austin to track and mix the album at Louie Lino’s Resonate Studios over the course of a hurried but productive two weeks.
“The studio was just one oblong room and one little control room, so it was small quarters but we’re used to that because we do a lot of recording in our house here,” Kircher says. “It was a pretty comfortable way to record. It was us living together in a tight space, just recording and getting to know each other through fights and spats and goofing around and drinking endless amounts of Lone Star. And we were playing Mario Tennis at all times, probably too much. It was just nice to leave our comfort zone.”
The result, Kircher says, is the band’s most cohesive album.
“I think it’s our best one,” he says. “It’s got more texture to it. It flows together better because of that. You know, Traps was made very piece by piece. And I love Traps; it’s a very pretty record. But I think it was lost on some people because it didn’t have the best production values, since we were making it over a slow, odd period, and it does meander a bit. But this one takes the better parts of that album’s progression and puts it into something that’s generally prettier and more approachable. Just having extra minds offering input on the music made a huge difference. I love the way Louie and the guys approached recording, because they had a clear idea of what they wanted to play, and I trusted them to layer the record in ways that I never could have thought of. It’s definitely five guys working on this album, and I think that’s what’s going to stand out to people.”
Jaill will host an outdoor album release party for Brain Cream in the parking lot of Just Art’s, 181 S. Second St., on Sunday, June 28 from 3-7 p.m. with Group of the Altos, Head On Electric and Sugar Stems.
