The Elected's "Jailbird" Reviewed
About 2 weeks ago, ‘Jaibird’ was one of the top tunes on Los Angeles based radio KCRW. I caught the song played on the radio once and was delighted by its simple and catchy melody, performed with a gentle guitar finger picking, even making some charming squeaks at the beginning, above a light piano.
The song comes from ‘Bury Me In My Rings’, the last and third album of the Elected, the band formed by ex-Rilo Kiley’s Black Sennett. I haven’t listened to the whole album yet, but ‘Jailbird’ sounds very different from the R&B style of ‘Babyface, another song of the album, made available a few weeks ago.
There’s a cute sadness in the somewhat uplifting melody combined with cryptic lyrics, a formula that always works.
What is sure is that Sennett sounds definitively very personal when he sings:
‘My girl, Jailbird, thinkin' I'll be mad/Jailbird, Jailbird, key under the mat/She eats out, she's quittin' drugs/Nothing left to kill those bugs/Jailbird, Jailbird, but it ain't black and white/She's innocent as peppermint, to this I'll testify’.
It is the kind of an ambiguous song which leaves you a little perplex, making you feel like a voyeur witnessing something intimate you don’t totally get.
http://www.kcrw.com/media-player/mediaPlayer2.html?type=audio&id=tu110525the_elected_jailbird
