Copyright 1993 The Times Mirror Company
Los Angeles Times
July 26, 1993, Monday, Home Edition
SECTION: Calendar; Part F; Page 7; Column 1; Entertainment Desk
LENGTH: 225 words
HEADLINE: POP AND JAZZ REVIEWS;
JELLYFISH BRINGS THE STING BACK TO '70S ROCK
BYLINE: By CHRIS WILLMAN
BODY:

     Fans of good hooks, lines and sinkers couldn't land better
seafood than Jellyfish. Surely the generation that belatedly took
"Bohemian Rhapsody" to No. 1 can find some similar use for this
quartet, which plays an unapologetic retro-pop so splendid it mak
es you want to take back every bad thing you said about the '70s
and start raving about the decade as a musical high-water mark.
     Fightin' words? Perhaps you had to be there, as the foursome
commandeered the Palace Friday and proved just about the tightest
band in the land. If the underlying ethic is somehow "alternative,"
Jellyfish is certainly traditionalist in hearkening back to
 a time when a lot of the musicians with the most outre, arch or
ironic sensibilities could also claim major chops as players.
     Andy Sturmer stands -- literally -- as one of the very few
drummer-singers in history to have a dynamic presence behind the
kit. He, longtime partner Roger Manning and two newer recruits
demonstrated a virtuosic command of complex arrangements even while
 realizing remarkable harmonies.
     The layered vocals inevitably recalled Queen, but also Brian
Wilson's best. And though the band borrowed against its Badfinger
debt with "Day After Day," this time it also acknowledged owing as
much to the Move with a stunning version of the 1967 "I Can 
Hear the Grass Grow."

CHRIS WILLMAN