Flooded AwayJared PutnamDescription: PRODUKTBESCHREIBUNGEN Sage and Jared's Happy Gland Band is a band of whimsy and unbridled glandulosity. It's a band that will make you reconsider how grossed out you are about the endocrine system. Sage plays ukulele. Jared plays upright bass. Their glistening songs of mundanity desecration celebration and perspiration appear on their CD 'Flooded Away' which the lovely Mel Minter reviewed for it's Oct 2013 release: The premiere release from Sage and Jared's Happy Gland Band Flooded Away may be the most charmingly peculiar-or maybe that's peculiarly charming-album I've heard since Jared Putnam's Brontosaurus on Pluto nearly three years ago. It's certainly the most seriously silly and whimsical. Sage is folkgrass singer/songwriter Sage Harrington and Jared is as you've probably guessed the aforementioned Putnam best known as the bassist and sometime vocalist/songwriter in the astonishing gypsy jazz band Le Chat Lunatique. (How it is that Le Chat is not yet a household name from coast to coast at least remains one of the mysteries and inequities of the music business.) SAJHGB describe themselves as a band of unbridled glandulosity. It's a band that will make you reconsider how grossed out you are about the endocrine system. They want to make your glands happy and they are pretty good at it. Harrington plays ukulele Putnam plays bass both of them sing sometimes extravagantly. Percussion kazoo whistling and clarinet also make appearances and without the liner notes at hand-Jared you silly man you never got back to me and God knows I tried-I'm not sure who should get credit for those. The only evidence I've turned up is a You Tube video that shows Putnam simultaneously playing bass and percussion scratching a drummer's brush on a board mounted on the face of his standup bass. Pretty imaginative. In fact the whole enterprise is pretty imaginative starting with the hand-made masthead on the website where by the way you can learn or probably mislearn that the ancient Sumerians were the first to wash their dogs. Then there are the literate clever wacky lyrics (prehensile tales of vestigial whales on Boiling Black Oceans a phantasmagoric recounting of evolutionary developments) and perfectly odd rhymes that require a very special poetic license available only from a secret corner of a parallel universe (quandary/laundry and dishes/kis(h)ses on I Want You All the Time a title that accurately describes the song's feverishly PG content). The songs cover a lot of territory. There's the Western swing of DIE! DIE! DIE! which is simultaneously gross and cute as only Putnam could manage. Without credits-really Jared pick up the phone-I'm only guessing here but I'd bet a bundle that he gets the major credit for that one. We've got the folksy Soap Floats and given that Harrington invites you to revel in the mundane with her solo release Maybe I've got to believe this one's hers. Then there's ZANZIBAR! which belongs in a bizarro version of a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby road flick (she took all my cash and left me with a rash in Zanzibar)-Putnam again I'm educationally guessing. Stroke My Ego-my bet: another Putnam special-is in the mold of the '30s American songbook wrapping an upbeat form around an ironic glimpse into darkish corners of the psyche. Harrington's wordless and theatrical vocal on that one is truly inspired taking the song into an eerie neighborhood. Speaking of Harrington's voice this lady's got quite the range a solid midrange and a spooky falsetto. She can inject a '20s quality into her vocalizing at will. I think she might have yodeled at birth. (Come to think of it Putnam has the same antiquing talent.) Harrington occasionally overloads the mic and there are other imperfections on the album that might keep it from a Grammy nomination but perfection isn't the point. Fun is the point. There are a couple of short sweet ukulele instrumentals honoring the Harrington/Putnam doggies: Daphne's Dance and George Michael's Dream. I'll give the provisional writing credit to Harrington on those two. Back to lyrics and in Walking we've got this perfectly icky silliness: I'm a little shy and spittle always seems to fly from my mouth. I'm a little shy and spittle always seems to make things go south. While the Wind Blows is a singularly tender and whimsical love song. Harrington's I think. If the album's songs and the online videos are any indication Harrington and Putnam inhabit a childlike bubble of boundless make-believe. Like children playing at fantastic worlds of their own imagining they display a single-minded commitment uncontaminated by self- consciousness and they appear to be having a hell of a time doing it. Me I like silly and when it's combined with clever my hormones find just the right sunny balance. My glands are much better. Thanks for asking. UPDATE: The devilishly busy Jared Putnam
