There is something so wonderfully 1983 about Jose’s Bad Day. The clean guitar sound, the understated vocals, the everyman lyrical sentiment, occasionally punched up with a layer of winning vocal harmonies – it all comes rushing back to me. The great jangly guitar and snaky organ work just help to bring it all home. Hi! Let’s Eat is an EP with five fabulous cuts that re-animate the sound of that great year in poprock, for me anyway. Opening track “Just Good Friends” has the studied nonchalance of Don Dixon’s recordings, obscuring the complexity of the song’s arrangement to bring the hooks to the surface. “How Will You Know?” is a lovely bit of light poprock, with subtle Merseyside turnarounds. Then “So Pretty I Lie” dials back the 1980s to maybe the late seventies to hit some new wave marks – those rhythm guitar shots are really working overtime here.  By contrast “Where Were You?” gives us a John Hiatt-style neo-1950s update, connecting with band leader Tim Reece’s other music project 40 Proof and its more Americana vibe. Yet when we hit the EP closer “Rushing In On Fool’s Day” the sound has shifted again, this time more reminiscent of Mark Everett’s A Man Called E project.

You can celebrate Jose’s Bad Day at their bandcamp page. Bad times never sounded so good.

Photo entitled ‘Knife’ courtesy Thomas Hawk Flikr collection.