New B. Jonestown/Warlocks Releases

Rise and Fall
Warlocks (Bomp)

Two excellent neo-psych renderings by two of the best the West Coast has to offer. The Jonestown are legendary for all their interband squabbles as well as feuds with their record label. The long-awaited followup to their–so far–only major label outing, Strung Out in Heaven, has yet to materialize. Like the last Buttholes album, it could be years before it ever comes out, but in the meantime there’s Bravery, Repetition and Noise, which sounds mostly like a bunch of demos as opposed to a real album–and wouldn’t you know it, it’s their best album since Take It from the Man, because a band like this clearly benefits from being presented in their most basic and raw form. There’s a garage-band quality to stuff like "Telegram" that puts them on a par with the Chesterfield Kings for being able to evoke such things. It sounds like a cut from Love’s first album, by way of the Beach Boys, and it only proves how timeless such stuff is when it’s done right.

"Open Heart Surgery" is classic Jonestown: a levitating piece of music with a heavy beat and skeletal guitars stabbing into the vapor like Keith Richards during the Let It Bleed phase. But since Jonestown leader Anton Newcombe is a nut, there’s also that insane Syd Barrett quality–he even fakes the British accent so you know he’s serious about it. "If I Love You?" is total Barrett–always a good thing in the annals of whimsy.

When it comes to neo-psychedelia these guys really are the kings. Just listen to "Sailor," which is the Bee Gees’ "Every Christian Lionhearted Man…" by way of Their Satanic Majesties Request. It’s also one of the most amazing pieces of "contemporary" music you’re likely to hear all year. Unlike other similar "revival" acts, the Jonestown almost always manage to supersede their influences. Tracks like "Sailor" and "You Have Been Disconnected" have hints of early Floyd, the Stones, the Beatles and the Who, but ultimately they’re better than any of them. What they manage to evoke is what you always kinda wished "classic rock" sounded like, and that’s no mean feat (because, admittedly, "classic rock" was pretty good).

Then you’ve got the Warlocks, who are a spinoff of the Jonestown and purvey many of the same retro-60s influences, the only difference being Anton and crew prefer to jam within more tightly imposed structures and the Warlocks tend to favor more lengthy "Sister Ray"-style excursions. But then, what would one expect from a Velvets namesake? "Jam of the Witches," which begins the CD, harkens right back to the good old Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Like one of those titanic Velvets jams, it works on a simple riff and just keeps going headlong into void. It’s all about forward movement and, like the Jonestown, the Warlocks know how to sustain the pace. This piece is more than 10 minutes long and never gets boring. It’s genuinely "psychedelic" as well. What it means is that bands like the Warlocks are succeeding on their own terms, and I wish we had more like them.

The second track, "House of Glass," is a masterpiece of, once again, Stones "Moonlight Mile"/"You Can’t Always Get What You Want"/"Salt of the Earth" proportions, an unbelievably majestic work in this day and age. Like the Jonestown, the thing that’s really amazing about these guys is the unself-consciousness about it–you could swear you’ve heard these sounds before, but yet they do it with enough originality and conviction that it never sounds hackneyed. As a friend of mine once said about the Jonestown, "It’s like they’re reinventing the wheel." And on tunes like "Left and Right of the Moon" and "Whips of Mercy," the Warlocks even out-Jonestown the Jonestown. Meanwhile, the self-explanatory "Song for Nico" would do the Rain Parade proud, and on the celestial "Motorcycles" they really reach for the stars. It doesn’t matter what era it comes out of or whether you think you’ve heard it all before–this is guitar-/drum-/vocal-based music that is absolutely thrilling and it shouldn’t be missed.