Given the easily accessible and oversaturated musical market of the current digital age, it’s hard to believe that there was a time in the not-so-distant past when rock n’ roll – not just the music, but the mere concept – was deemed dangerous.
Whether it was the racial and sexual implications that challenged the ideas of the existing order, or the sheer reckless energy that threatened to forever change the way the youth culture viewed its own empowerment, the genre that seems so second-nature today was indeed once seen as a primitive beast capable of clawing its way straight through the very fabric of society.
That time may have clearly come and gone, but that doesn’t mean the sentiment surrounding the era has vanished altogether. Perhaps no other band right now still carries that sentiment with the same spirit and urgency as The Jim Jones Revue.
Formed back in 2004, the five-piece from London have been barnstorming across Europe ever since, whipping crowd after crowd into a frenzy with their own wild re-imagining of golden-age American rock. By channeling the piano-driven boogie of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and then filtering it through the ear-splitting distortion of MC5 and The Stooges, this group of middle-aged misfits has somehow managed to breathe life back into what appeared to be an outdated approach.
After an under-the-radar self-titled debut and a rag-tag collection of singles, the band bounced back with a firecracker of a follow up in the form of ‘Burning Your House Down‘. Produced by New York underground icon and longtime Nick Cave associate Jim Sclavunos, this carefully crafted collection of songs captures Jim Jones & co at their primordial peak, from the first razor sharp guitar solo right down to the last bruising bash of the cymbal.
The album is arranged from start to finish in the manner of a live set, and is delivered with the same amount of intensity that is often exhibited onstage. Opener ‘Dishonest John‘ is a two-minute bullet train that comes across like a hopped-up Johnny Thunders doing an even more hopped-up rendition of ‘Good Golly Miss Molly‘. The following track, ‘High Horse‘, apes the antics of Richard Wayne Penniman even further, with its barn-burning backbeat and a stop-start vocal intro that has frontman Jones delivering a throat-shredding scream to the cadence of a punk rock take on“a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom.”
From then on, the record is off and running in a whiskey-soaked rampage. ‘Foghorn‘ is a blue-collar blast of back-alley sleaze rock, while the title track itself is a liquor-laced lesson in bar-room bravado, complete with a mesmerizing mid-song solo from pianist Elliot Mortimer, as well as an arrogant array of threats from Jones that would make George Thorogood blush.
Meanwhile, ‘Shoot First‘ could almost be an ‘Imagine‘-era outtake, if John Lennon had just come back from the future with some Reverend Horton Heat records to complement his cache of Howlin’ Wolf. Then there’s ‘Righteous Wrong‘, an exhilarating gospel-infused number in which Jones plays a preacher riding a wave of religiosity in reverse, calling not for eternal enlightenment, but instead for inevitable destruction.
Much like the style it continuously references, ‘Burning Your House Down’ is not exactly new. The album was released last year in the UK, but has just this week seen the light of day in the US via the band’s own Punk Rock Blues label. It’s about time, considering the wealth of obvious American inspiration that is scattered throughout the record.
This singularity of vision could easily be seen as a setback, except Jones and lead guitarist Rupert Orton have both made no attempt at explaining away the influence. They formed the Jim Jones Revue with the unabashed intent of revving rock n’ roll’s engine, and in the process they nearly ran the car off the road.
(Beau De Lang)