1000 Great Quilt

The nicest thing anyone has ever – ever – said to Jo Hirabayashi, frontman of Jo Passed, is that his band's debut album sounds like “fucked-up Beatles”. 'Their Prime', the full-length follow-up to Jo Passed’s two EPs, 'Up' and 'Out', does sound like fucked-up Beatles. It sounds like Lennon and McCartney discovered Can and Neu!, and maybe a little Sonic Youth and XTC along the way. It demonstrates that timeless knack for dreamy melodies – chord progressions that sound like they were created in a land far, far away. Lyrically, however, it's imbued with a philosophical longing for answers to questions that have resurfaced for the first time since the explosion of counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s.