Isaac Brock’s high-school pal and first vanity label signing neither modest nor mousy
Except for a few of you, the name Sam Jayne probably has no special meaning. Some may recognize him as ex-leader of Olympia-based indie noiseniks Lync, as one of Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock’s oldest friends, or even as the cousin of late Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley. But most are unaware that Jayne is now six full-length albums into his career as frontman for the indescribably psychedelic Love as Laughter—and that’s a shame, one that his quartet’s latest offering, Holy, aims to correct. Jayne’s music is at once disorienting and familiar. It touches all the right “wrong” sounds (classic shaggy-dog Neil Young on “Kenny and Jim,” vintage Talking Heads on the vaguely funky “All Parts of Me,” and let’s not bend our brains too vigorously pondering what part of Margaritaville “Coconut Flakes” hails from), but the album combines them in ways that only someone operating slightly outside the boundaries of reality would ever dream.