Band Spits Out Bubble Gum, Turns Up Heat
New York Times
by JON CARAMANICA
June 12, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/arts/music/13jonas.html?_r=1&em

The tap was firm, insistent, not timid at all. It came from below. She was 12, maybe 13. 

The voice was equally sharp: ?Can you, like, move to the back, ?cause you?re, like, really tall??

There come moments in a critic?s career when one must sacrifice for the greater good, when the needs of one can be set aside temporarily for the comfort of others.

Reader, the critic stayed put.

It was Thursday night at the Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza, and the Jonas Brothers had just taken the stage. The pushing began straightaway. The noise was beyond deafening. Real estate was at a premium, eardrums were not.

On Tuesday the boys from Wyckoff, N.J., will release ?Lines, Vines and Trying Times? (Hollywood), their fourth and most relaxed album, and this summer they will tour arenas. But for the opportunity to see their stage show compressed into a relatively tiny hot box, some violations of the social contract were in order. (This was a secret show, made public early in the day on Thursday through the band?s fan club and the radio station Z100.)

Joe, 19, wore a plaid sports coat and tousled hair; Nick, 16, a rumpled black Nehru-collar blazer with white stripes; and Kevin, 21, a beige ruffled shirt and a series of goofy facial expressions. As ever, they were efficient, even when packed onto a stage with 10 band members, including a newly added four-piece horn section that made for a couple of E Street Band moments.

Nick was firm and refined, a classic singer-songwriter in the making, as seen in an assured version of ?Black Keys,? played solo at the piano. His anchor was needed, as Joe veered from loose to looser. During older songs like ?Hold On? and ?That?s Just the Way We Roll,? he seemed caught in some sort of private trance, undulating Jim Morrison-like at center stage and mouthing the words while Nick manned the steering wheel. For most of the night, Kevin kept clear of any microphones, though on ?Turn Right? he spun off a flamboyant guitar solo, standing wide-stance atop the piano in a lone moment of unfettered glory.

On ?Lines, Vines and Trying Times,? the Jonas Brothers continue to specialize in the smartly straightforward: neatly constructed pop-rock songs with shades of the Beatles and the Brill Building. (An exception is the inscrutable getaway caper ?Don?t Charge Me for the Crime,? featuring the rapper Common, with echoes of the Police.)

But they?re beginning to reach further afield musically, with faint touches of ska (?Keep It Real?) and country (?What Did I Do to Your Heart?). ?Before the Storm? manages to be both Nashville and Hollywood: it?s a lovely breakup ballad with Nick and his ex-girlfriend Miley Cyrus. (She did not appear at the show.) It?s also a brilliant stroke of tabloid-baiting and homage-paying to the pop tradition of exes? working out their issues in song.

Sometimes, though, there?s no reconciling to be done. Last year the young country star Taylor Swift went public with the details of her breakup with Joe Jonas, a subject on which he remained largely quiet. ?Much Better,? a slick white-soul number from the new album, ends that silence.

?Got a rep for breaking hearts,? Joe sings. ?Now I?m done with superstars/and all the tears on her guitar/I?m not bitter.?

All over ?Lines, Vines and Trying Times? are signs of incipient frustration with women, something of a tectonic shift for a group for which self-professed chastity has been an engine. There were traces of this dissatisfaction on the group?s last album, ?A Little Bit Longer,? which was released last summer, particularly on the track ?Video Girl,? a shocking lump of cynicism dropped cold in the middle of a batch of songs about enthusiastic, incomprehensible love. Even on the dreamy ?Lovebug? they were skeptical: ?Honesty is just so hard to find.?

But there?s no getting around the lessons 10 months of megastardom will teach you. On the very first line of the new album, on ?World War III,? Nick sings about fighting with, um, an intimate: ?I walked into the bedroom/You were visibly upset/Telling me I made a bad move.? By the sound of his voice, he?s not singing about a parent.

?We?ve been through a lot this past year,? Nick said midshow. ?We?re all growing older. There?s depth in our eyes.?

But what about in their perspective? The power-poppy ?Poison Ivy? reads like crude metaphor: ?I just got back from the doctor/He told me that I had a problem/I realized it?s you.? And at the hook, it?s no kinder: ?Everybody gets the itch/Everybody hates that ...?

The line stops there, but hundreds of girls in this sweltering room needed no prompt to fill in the rhyme. They almost sounded sympathetic.