No Skips: Jake Love on The Mint Chicks 'Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!'
Aotearoa's dream-pop prince presents a kiwi classic to the No-Skips hall of fame...
The premise of ‘No Skips’ is simple: I think the advent of music streaming/algorithms has inadvertently made our music tastes very insular. Personally, I’ve found it a lot harder to find new music to fall in love with that’s not just something an algorithm thinks I’d be keen on based on data it’s collected on me.
So to broaden my, and hopefully your, musical horizons, each week I reach out to musicians I love to get their recommendation on an album they believe deserves the title of 'No Skips'— one you can listen to front to back without wanting to skip a single track.
This week we are joined by Jake Love, a multi-faceted talent who has created catchy indie dream pop earworms under his solo work, as well as fuzzed-out garage rock about the Teletubbies vacuum and Blue Pick Up Trucks as part of Shaun’s Bday. Jake covers the iconic and beloved album Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! by Kiwi post-punk legends The Mint Chicks.
I, like many millennials in New Zealand, came across this album because of the omnipresent title track. That song was everywhere for a brief minute and when you saw that suburban house on C4 you knew you were in for a good time. The Mint Chicks made the inside of Kiwi suburban homes cool long before Lorde (though maybe after Fast Crew's Suburbia Streets?). Also as a teen learning to play the drums in 2006, that song just had such a fun, instantly recognisable beat to brutally butcher at jams with friends cos you couldn't do single-stroke rolls fast enough. I actually didn't get deep into the album until much later on when it had somehow made its way onto my iPod and slowly but surely became an absolute staple of my drives.
ENERGY BABY!!!!!!! If you ever got to see The Mint Chicks live, or even videos of them live (they famously once illegally played a show in the North Head tunnels), you'll know that they just went faster and harder, all while keeping the songs more interesting, more infectious and more goddang powerful. While Ruban said in a 2019 interview with The Spinoff that they think other Mint Chicks albums Fuck The Golden Youth and Screens are better than C?Y!D?N! (but seriously what abbreviation are we going with for this thing?) for me it just has this immediate feeling like caffeine directly to the veins. Something in the way it's recorded just feels so immediate and in your face. The drums are huge. The bass is even huger (opener Ockham's Razor remains maybe my all-time fav riff). To this day if I feel like playing the drums and just wanna play fast and fun beats this album is still my go-to.
Seriously, I think for almost anyone opening track Ockham's Razor should be enough to do the trick of hooking a newbie in. Hell, the first minute should be enough to do the trick. But honestly, I think that if any individual person shared with me, like, five of their favorite musicians I could find them at least something to love on this album. It is frantic, its poppy, its dark, it even has a 6 minute ambient piano ballad with a delay pedal solo (yes I consider 100 Minutes of Silence a no skip too, and if you don't agree @ me baby)
Has this album influenced you as an artist in any way, and if so, how? And if not, what can you still appreciate about it as a musician?
Oh yeh. Big time. For one thing this album is an absolute library of immaculate bass tones. I think it's a fantastic example of how to take the sometimes limited four-piece band concept and elevate it, while still keeping the core essence of what that band's all about. It's also an album I think about when it comes to the idea of just backing your vision. There are ideas on pretty much every one of these tracks that are so left-field and chaotic that somehow only serve to make each song so much better for being there. But for me and my personal love for this much-loved Kiwi staple, it all comes back to energy. I feel like music should have an infectiousness to it that could be likened to almost an X factor, and whether it’s an individual thing or a more universal concept unless you have that unexplainable something that makes people wanna play your song, or music video, or album or whatever over and over again, it's always gonna feel just not quite there. For my money, this album has that something coming out of its fucken ass.
Big thanks to Jake for covering a certified Kiwi No Skip! Be sure to start your day right by checking out a few of his tunes, starting with ‘Now She’s Gone’ below, and you’ll find you’ll have skip in your step for the rest of your day!