The Mittens - This Carnival Egg

In the early 90’s, the local music scene of Cedar Falls, Iowa seemed healthy. A fairly supportive community, led by the power-trio House of Large Sizes, spawned a handful of bands playing original music among a the venues that were willing to book a variety of genres, provided that the attendees purchased the obligatory number of Leinenkugel’s to help cover the overhead.
Back then, there were independent record stores where you could buy records and cds. There was enough interest in H.O.L.S. to get their album My Ass-Kicking Life distributed by Columbia. And there was enough talent to warrant House’s leader, Dave Diebler, to start his own record label and get the local bands on vinyl.
Fast-forward to Cedar Falls circa today and, like a lot of places around the country, you’ll find things have changed. The venues and record stores in this college town have diminished or disappeared entirely. The scene found itself fragmented to the point where the idea of a “community” became a utopia that the “old-timers” preached and the younger set ridiculed.
Kevin Jass, frontman for C.F.’s The Mittens has been around long enough to witness the town’s landscape change firsthand; he was/is a regular audience member of local shows and his first band, Mugwump, released a single in the early 90’s on Diebler’s North Cedar label. And unlike a lot of people who temporarily reside in college towns, Jass has remained in Cedar Falls, fiercely loyal to the inspirations that prompted him to pick up a Gibson guitar in the first place.
After all: one could do worse than to have a protégé like Dave Diebler.
On The Mittens’ third album, This Carnival Egg, Jass continues to kick and scream his way into middle age by picking up the pieces of his disbanded muse and soldiering on. With Niles Naaktgeboren on bass and his brother William on drums, Jass has found a pair of Cedar Valley music veterans with a similar realization that the band is more of a creative release for after-work rehearsals and weekend gigs than a full time rock dream.
This Carnival Egg lifts heavily from H.O.L.S. (“Basement Window” contains a bass line eerily similar to House’s “Nocturnal”) along with the occasional nod to fellow Midwesterners The Magnolias. Throughout it, Jass sounds positively defeated, alternating from a weary yell to a somnolent undertone with a humbucker being his last standing leg. The Naatkgeboren brothers provide him with a reliable rhythm section; rather than flaunt the experience they bring to the band, they provide a suitable support for Jass to exercise his frustrations.
His topics range from the obligatory exodus of any college town (“Saw you then you disappeared/Frozen, a shadow from another year”) to the increasing lack of civility (“Nice is worth a nickel, I heard you say/It never comes back”) in a society that increasingly finds road rage as a contact sport. Jass seems to be one of those people who quietly fester at the things that negatively impact his life only to let them loose when the guitar strap is comfortably resting across his shoulders.
The band stumbles on a few tracks, namely “Prozac Smile,” a momentum stopper that strangely finds 80’s synthesizers competing against a perfectly capable 90’s rock vibe. When the band uses more organic treatments (pedal steel, Hammond B-3) to expand their pallet, it works.
Aside from these minor quips, This Carnival Egg provides a refreshing visitation of an era that practiced its therapy sessions in the basement lit with forty-watt light bulbs and powered by hundred-watt combo amps. It was a period when bands spent less time contemplating how they would spend the record label advance money and more time on refining the nuances of their Friday night setlist. Sure, the latter is less glamorous and requires work, but then again, nobody said playing rock music would be easy.
So while some upstarts might view The Mittens as the remnants of a bygone era, it will only be a matter of time before they’ll become the reference point in much the same way their influences were for them.
And one could do worse than having a protégé like Kevin Jass.