Smart, witty and delightfully absurd aptly cover the descriptive bases of Jim’s Big Ego—a group that is, according to them, “The Greatest Band in the History of Recorded Music.”
Comparing itself to such major players as The Great Wall of China, The Grand Canyon, Antarctica and “other things you can see from space,” JBE waxes ridiculous on topics including cults, information overload, money, and the rapture. And every song—delivered with earnest irony and ace musicianship—has some oddball quality that makes it an irresistible sing-along.
The band’s press release declares “Jim’s Big Ego’s secret to awesomeness is singer, songwriter, and all around super-genius, Jim Infantino. Armed with the innate ability to create songs that are more brilliant than all others in history, Infantino gives the band the gift of greatness.”
The band’s name and bloated sense of self is a fitting suit of armor for Infantino who has said, “I was really self-conscious about standing in front of a group and having them play my songs. It was most honest to say that it was just about me. So in order to defray that a little bit, I put the name out there as my big ego.”
JBE’s newest release, Stay, is a pitch perfect collection of catchy tunes from this Boston-based group that claims to have “carved a unique place in the music world by rocking harder, fresher, louder, sweeter and better than everyone else.”
The priceless opening track, “My Cult,” is made even more nutty with the field day the band had with Auto-Tune. “Interestingly, we had some complaints,” Infantino told NPR. “We used Auto-Tune very heavily in that song. We tried it both ways. We tried it without Auto-Tune. And we used it the way Cher uses it, you know, just turning it all the way up. It’s ridiculous sounding.”
“In my cult, we wear a simple weave in my cult. There’s nothing to believe in my cult. Our clothes do not have sleeves. You may think that we are naive, but there’s a lot of joie de vivre in my cult.”
“This song was actually written as a group with Jesse Flack, Dan Cantor, Josh Kantor and myself,” says Infantino. “It came about because I had an opportunity to go and play a New Year’s concert at a Buddhist practice center at which I go to meditate. And Jesse said, ‘Oh, so we’re going to go play your cult.’ So we immediately leapt on that and began to build it into this tune that shows how crazy the things can seem from inside of your little bubble if you’re looking at it from the outside, even though everything seems normal inside of the bubble to you.”
While the debate still rages over whether the band’s formation was a matter of divine providence or historical inevitability, they feel that one fact remains clear: If the world ended today, Jim’s Big Ego would die happy knowing that they were more talented than Oasis, more popular than Terence Trent D’Arby and richer than MC Hammer.
