Jump, S/T (early '70s?)

This is one of those albums that winds up in the dollar bin because, in all honesty, ain't nobody want to buy an album with a big old shoe on the cover.

BUT WAIT A MOMENT MY CHILD, WHAT'S THIS???

Why, it's the four disembodied heads of  "Jump", flying out of the shoe on a rainbow!

This catastrophic design decision is probably the reason why an allmusic.com search for Jump contains no mention of this band whatsoever (and instead reads like a team of brain-stormers with lexical constipation were trying to come up with the name for a Christian music aerobics festival).

My initial guess was the the long-hair rockers from Jump never saw this cover until it was too late, and that shortly after they emerged stinking from the studio, someone in the Janus label art department was sent home bloody-faced and weeping to their family. But then I noticed a detail in this posse shot:

Jump: just a fun bunch of guys.

LOOK CLOSER AT THE FEETS

Digitally enhanced image.

Yep, I do believe that's lead guitarist Dennis Tracy sporting the ever-so-distinctive shoe from the cover, and its twin. I think "Jump" were doomed from the first - just imagine if the cover for "Appetite for Destruction" featured Axl Rose's head flying out of one of his nasty old Chuck Taylors and ask yourself whether you'd know the name "Guns'n'Roses" today.

(You would not).

As this is ostensibly a music blog and not a dang old design blog, I should point out that the quality of music on this LP is far better than that ghastly glam-rock-looking foot apparatus would suggest - my fave on here is "Bank of Love", which is about one time when a lowly teller from the Bank of  Love decided to rob the Bank of Love (OMG alert!)

Jump - Bank of Love by doggziller

Sonny Charles, "One Eyed Jacks" (1982)

 There are various reasons to like a song apart from how you feel about it as music. Both Ben and I, for example, have a fondness for a meta-genre which I have just this instant decided to call Overextended Metaphor Groove (OMG).

As the name suggests, these are songs where the artist has committed to shoe-horning all their passions/joys/torment into the framework of a single over-arching metaphor. Sonny Charles' "One-Eyed Jack" for example, is basically a song about player-hating expressed mainly with reference to playing cards (and with total sincerity).

"The one-eyed jack is a mysterious card,

only one side you can see."

Taking a scientific approach, I quickly counted the total number of lines in the song and divided by the number of lines that contain explicit card game references (chorus counted only once). This gave an OMG compliance ratio of 53.33%, i.e. just over half of all lines in the song have some nonsense about card games in them. This is actually much lower than I expected and definitely shows the value of taking a hard-nosed, evidence-led approach (to my dismay Sonny went off the rails on the second verse and neglected to mention playing cards at all).

By the way, I have made a shortened edit of this song as after the two minute mark it does nothing but repeat the fairly ordinary chorus for another three minutes (yes, this song has a "chorus-til-fade" segment that lasts longer than the song proper - better to go for a breakdown when you've run out of ideas I'd have thought)

Sonny Charles - One-Eyed Jack

More OMG will be posted as it comes to my attention!