[$5 // Edition of 100 // https://janelanemusic.bandcamp.com/album/peaches-and-cream-cassette-edition]
While the "Peaches And Cream" cassette from Janelane acts like a cassingle of sorts it's actually so much more intricate within the structure of it and the way which these songs are presented. I had a teacher once who- back when I was pierced- said he liked that I had two earrings in my left ear and only one in the right because of the lack of symmetry. And it's true- you always think of things like earrings being sold as pairs and as such for a cassingle you would expect this to have one song per side but rather there are two songs on Side A and only one song on Side B and with good reason might I add.
The first song is a nice dreamy number that takes me back to the old school rock n roll days of artists like Buddy Holly. When I was younger and watched more television I'd have to sit through commercials when I didn't feel like getting up and there was always this one compilation CD they wanted you to buy that had songs like "Teen Angel" and "Why Must I Be a Teenager In Love" on it and so that's what I always think of when I hear songs like this. Well, that and sock hops, jukeboxes on the tables at diners, poodle skirts and The Fonz. But, I digress.
"Killing Time" is the second song and you have to imagine it as being similar in most of the overall qualities of the first song only the dreamy sense is taken out of it. It's just this clear cut pop rock type of song that could be anything from That Dog. to The Cardigans with vocal patterns that remind me of Metric just as well. As the line "I'm just killing time now, baby" is sung over and over the guitar riffs have this surf quality to them but it's not in the same way as "Wipeout" but rather like something from Hawaii-- like that one Weezer song about being on island in the sun.
On Side B we get a song which is shorter than either of the songs on the first side but it certainly is trippy. Somewhere between The Velvet Underground and a Jim Carroll drug-enduced hallucination, the vocals can be found in the background as screams and all of the pop has been stripped out of this making it a rock song that takes quite a leap from the previous two numbers on Side A.
If you can agree with me that "LP" stands for "long play" then you'll probably also want "EP" to be "extended play" but I've never quite understood that because an extension can be different for individual artists. I've always thought of "EP" as being "example play" in the way that the artists was giving you an example of what they could do, a little taste before the full length. (Why don't we call full length albums "FL"? Can we blame that on Florida?) As an example of what Janelane can do musically I must say that I am rather impressed by these three songs even if they don't necessarily go together.
This is where the beauty in the placement of these songs comes into play. If the third song wasn't isolated on Side B as it is here it might like a big leap to take for some people because it just feels slightly out of place, yet it does have some of the same qualities so I could see it as being part of an eventual full length album by Janelane just not in the third spot with the other two songs before it.
If I was going to predict a Janelane full length album and knew these songs were to be on it, I'd say out of ten or twelve songs I'd keep the first two on here at spots 1 and 2 and then put the third song down to maybe 7 or 8. The idea of what songs could fill the spots between 3 and 6 is what makes this cassette most appealing perhaps as it follows the old addage "Always leave 'em wanting more".
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