A rollicking percussive beat. Lush guitar melodies. An inviting harmony forms somewhere in between. For Dino Jag, playing by his own rules comes standard with the territory that is the recording studio, and in his new single “Shake a Leg Like Elvis,” we get an idea of just how committed he is to making music that no one else can.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that Dino Jag is changing the rock universe with what he has produced in “Shake a Leg Like Elvis;” in fact, I would say that he’s sticking to a pretty basic creative structure in the composing of this hit single. In an age of minimalist pop ideals and anti-cathartic choruses almost everywhere we look and listen these days, here we find a player – and a song – that look back at the history of spellbinding rock grooves in search of a relative kinship between today’s surreal verses and yesterday’s involved tones, textures, rhythms, and rhymes.
Dino Jag finds a space between adult contemporary throwbacks and majestic pop/rock futurism in “Shake a Leg Like Elvis,” and it’s a space I think listeners should explore the next time he’s in the market for new tunes. There aren’t very many a/c singles currently on the charts that have as much of an instrumental thrust as “Shake a Leg Like Elvis” does, but I wouldn’t say this song is exclusively driven by its sizeable sonic presence.
There are subtle details inside of every component in the track – from the bass to the drums, guitar and back to the vocals, we encounter a pained ache in the music here that tells us so much more about the mood of the lyrics than the words on his own would ever be able to (no matter how talented the singer serenading us with the aforementioned verses may or may not be). The poetry isn’t quite as potent a force to be reckoned with as the instrumental wall of melodies is in “Shake a Leg Like Elvis,” but had either of these elements been changed in any way, I’m not convinced that this single would be as captivating as it is in this present state.
Despite the vast smorgasbord of options you’ve got in the independent market this October, I don’t think you’re going to find a more elaborately postmodern and communicatively cerebral offering from an adult contemporary act as you will in Dino Jag’s “Shake a Leg Like Elvis” and the other work that this player has submitted over the last few years of his life. “Shake a Leg Like Elvis” is a dreamy pop song that lives in two separate, distinct universes simultaneously, but although it’s rooted in crossover aesthetics that some would just as soon dismiss as being too impure for the serious audiophile to appreciate, I for one think it’s a fair amalgamation of stylistic loose ends that can satisfy one crowd just as well as it could another.
That’s not usually the case with content in this genre, let alone amongst the output of underground bands in general, and it’s something that I think Dino Jag deserves to be very proud of.
Chadwick Easton