When meeting at the condo of a Top Reviewer in Music, in this case Nate Atcheson, it is considered good manners to bring, as tribute, two songs that represent you best of any songs in the world, except for being (1) under five minutes in length and (2) findable as MP3's, which rules out several of the songs that would represent _me_ best. That posed no problem, however, since I was both proud and able to represent, instead, my favorite band from my chosen hometown (my other song choice, "Me and You vs. the World", represented a bunch of thick-accented Brits called Space, who have nothing to do with this review). The Jim's Big Ego song I chose, "Stress", the leadoff from their most recent release Noplace Like Nowhere, seems to indicate at first that the album will be a proud extension of the geek-funk of Don't Get Smart. Jesse Flack provides the jazz bass, he and Jesse Vena both provide falsetto soul-man harmonies, and Jim, accenting the smoky beat-poet aspects of his amiable tenor, arguably out-virtuosos his "Ahead Of The Curve" vocal performance. This time Jim, in overachiever garb, is competing in the national speech/debate finals for Melodramatic Interpretation, selling four minutes of such A.D.D. logic as

"What I'd like most is to be all by myself in a little tiny island in the middle of the ocean, just me and a book, and a cellular phone, and a personal computer in case something came up. And I'd eat and drink and I'd sleep and I wouldn't do nothing but swim all day, 'cept you know, my beeper doesn't work under water, and where are the sharks, where are the sharks?? And then there's this kind of anemone that sticks in your foot and the poison goes straight up to your brain, and you die! And sand fleas, sand fleas: yucch!"



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