Flooded Away

Sage and Jared's Happy Gland Band is a band of whimsy and unbridled glandulosity. It's a band that will make you reconsider how grossed out you are about the endocrine system. Sage plays ukulele. Jared plays upright bass. Their glistening songs of mundanity, desecration, celebration, and perspiration appear on their CD, 'Flooded Away,' which the lovely Mel Minter reviewed for it's Oct 2013 release: The premiere release from Sage and Jared's Happy Gland Band, Flooded Away, may be the most charmingly peculiar-or maybe that's peculiarly charming-album I've heard since Jared Putnam's Brontosaurus on Pluto nearly three years ago. It's certainly the most seriously silly and whimsical. Sage is folkgrass singer/songwriter Sage Harrington, and Jared is, as you've probably guessed, the aforementioned Putnam, best known as the bassist and sometime vocalist/songwriter in the astonishing gypsy jazz band Le Chat Lunatique. (How it is that Le Chat is not yet a household name from coast to coast, at least, remains one of the mysteries and inequities of the music business.) SAJHGB describe themselves as quot;a band of unbridled glandulosity. It's a band that will make you reconsider how grossed out you are about the endocrine system.quot; They want to make your glands happy, and they are pretty good at it. Harrington plays ukulele, Putnam plays bass, both of them sing, sometimes extravagantly. Percussion, kazoo, whistling, and clarinet also make appearances, and without the liner notes at hand-Jared, you silly man, you never got back to me, and God knows I tried-I'm not sure who should get credit for those. The only evidence I've turned up is a You Tube video that shows Putnam simultaneously playing bass and percussion, scratching a drummer's brush on a board mounted on the face of his standup bass. Pretty imaginative. In fact, the whole enterprise is pretty imaginative, starting with the hand-made masthead on the website, where, by the way, you can learn or probably mislearn that quot;the ancient Sumerians were the first to wash their dogs.quot; Then, there are the literate, clever, wacky lyrics (quot;prehensile tales of vestigial whalesquot; on quot;Boiling Black Oceans,quot; a phantasmagoric recounting of evolutionary developments), and perfectly odd rhymes that require a very special poetic license, available only from a secret corner of a parallel universe (quandary/laundry and dishes/kis(h)ses on quot;I Want You All the Time,quot; a title that accurately describes the song's feverishly PG content). The songs cover a lot of territory. There's the Western swing of quot;DIE! DIE! DIE!quot; which is simultaneously gross and cute as only Putnam could manage. Without credits-really, Jared, pick up the phone-I'm only guessing here, but I'd bet a bundle that he gets the major credit for that one. We've got the folksy quot;Soap Floats,quot; and given that Harrington invites you to quot;revel in the mundanequot; with her solo release, Maybe, I've got to believe this one's hers. Then, there's quot;ZANZIBAR!quot; which belongs in a bizarro version of a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby road flick (quot;she took all my cash and left me with a rash in Zanzibarquot;)-Putnam again, I'm educationally guessing. quot;Stroke My Egoquot;-my bet: another Putnam special-is in the mold of the '30s American songbook, wrapping an upbeat form around an ironic glimpse into darkish corners of the psyche. Harrington's wordless and theatrical vocal on that one is truly inspired, taking the song into an eerie neighborhood. Speaking of Harrington's voice, this lady's got quite t