Don’t be fooled by the title of their latest album Beginnings; The JB Conspiracy have secretly been moving pieces around behind the scenes for years. Biding their time. Waiting for their opportunity to strike and put their plans into motion. As it turned out, June of 2021 was that time. Don’t ask me why. I just report the facts. The whos, whats, and wheres. The whys are left to higher minds … or, you know, London ska bands like The JB Conspiracy.
The JB Conspiracy first formed in 2007 and share some membership with late ’90s, U.K. ska band Duff Muffin. Despite the name of their most recent album, Beginnings is actually their third. Sort of like doing a prequel for the third film in a trilogy. Or maybe it’s to launch a second trilogy out of the ashes of the first?
Either way, Beginnings is a fresh take on the band’s bombastic ska-punk sound that I think has some timely callbacks to a past era whose sights and sounds are quickly re-establishing themselves. Specifically, The JB Conspiracy is reaching for the pop-emo and big-ticket pop-punk relevance of a Fall Out Boy or Taking Back Sunday on this release.
The arena-sized sound that the pop-emo of the ’00s and ’10s eventually wound its way up into being never really had a parallel in the realm of ska-punk during the same era. The closest that we got were RX Bandits and Streetlight Manifesto. But RX Bandits were only ever willing to flaunt the experimental nature of their sound as opposed to its “Biggness” or catchiness, and Streetlight Manifesto just always seemed a better fit for the atmosphere of a small club.
That is not the case for Beginnings. The JB Conspiracy wants you and a couple thousand of your closest friends to be pogoing and skanking together in a recently reopened soccer stadium. Anything more parochial would be shortchanging their ambitions under-appreciating their sound.
There are definitely moments on Beginnings where I had to double-check that Patrick Stump was not actually fronting the band or that Pete Wentz didn’t have a writing credit on any of these tracks. Some of these hooks are so big and glamourous it’s hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be any of the Wilmette band’s DNA in the structure of Beginnings. This is all worth mentioning, only because I think it is working for The JB Conspiracy.
With big theater and arena shows potentially coming back this year, we’re going to need bands with sounds blown out enough to fill those spaces and be worth the wait in quarantine. And The JB Conspiracy is right there in the sweet spot to get in on this action. Had Beginnings come out two years earlier I would have thought they would have sounded dated, but at this moment, a younger cohort of rock fans are just rediscovering a whole spectrum of sound that for people like me was just what contemporary rock was like during highschool.
A lot of that stuff has aged pretty well though, so it’s not surprising that kids would be picking it up today, and The JB Conspiracy seems primed to mop up pretty well and make some new converts to their cause. That is, if they play their cards right (which would mean just playing their new album Beginnings, live).
You can buy and stream Beginnings below via Bandcamp.
Beginnings is out via Everything Sucks Music. Check them out here.
