The Jim Jones All Stars - Cat Fight: Album Review

Artwork for the jim jones all stars album cat fight

3. 5 starsss

The mere presence of The Jim Jones All Stars’ new album suggests that there’s plenty of mic stand grabbing life left in rock n roll yet.

So, where to attach them to? The answer of course is the nipples, always the nipples.

Wait, just what the hell are we talking about here? Well, obviously the topic for discussion is exactly where on the cadaver of rock n’ roll you’d place the electrodes if you wanted to shock it back to life again.

If the heart of the thing is still beating – just – then you’d still have volunteers charging up the battery.

One of those parties would undoubtedly be the combined personnel of The Jim Jones All Stars, or definitely at least frontman Jim Jones, for whom keeping the spirit of the music in its purest/impurest sense has been a personal mission going back more than thirty years.

Jones was originally frontman of Thee Hypnotics, a band who surfed through the UK’s brief garage rock revival during the early nineties; Jones would start fronting his own outfits after they folded, with the mission he accepted then more or less the same ever since.

Following the demise of Jim Jones & The Righteous Mind, The Jim Jones All Stars picked up the mantle with 2023’s Ain’t No Peril, then slipped out a document of their infamously intense live performances in Get Down – Get With It last year.

Produced by The Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson and with a further guest appearance from Chuck Prophet, Cat Fight’s mere presence suggests that there’s plenty of mic stand grabbing life left in this thing yet.

From this pulpit the message is always the same; a chord, a beat and some bass are kings of all they survey.

Opener Make It Rain has everything turned up to 11; Zep-type riffs, parping brass, funky bassline and vocals borrowed from a pre gentrification Steven Tyler.

That’s followed by the Stax inspired Exiled, an all-night runner of a tune imbued with a little Little Richard piano and plenty of southern swagger (which is correct – it was recorded in the deep south of Leeds).

If you prefer a different location how does Illinois sound? The album’s title-track rasps with the kind of skronk and boogie that you’d expect in the warm up for a Jake and Elwood show, a throwback that heaps on the sense of theatre like onions on your hot dog.

So far, so cautiously retro good. But this is a way of working that risks straying across the teensy-weensy, ultra-thin boundary from standing up to be counted into derivation and parody.

When that inevitably happens – as on the stodgy attempted leather jacket anthem Born 2 Ride – nostalgia grates rather than satisfies, whilst the atonal Bekolah is a kaftan or three short of a fancy dress party.

What comes across most, however, is authentic love – both for time in which rock was in its feral primacy, and also for still evangelizing it to anyone who’ll listen.

As testament to this is the likes of Goin’ Higher, a stomper with a Duane Eddy guitar hoop as an attempt to muzzle the nasty garage vibes, whilst Chubby pouts with a trembling, beast with two backs undertow.

The final word, however, lies with closer Let U Go, a bullseye that never lets the quest for being real get in the way of just being a great song.

Perhaps it’s ironic that the digital age has made the original perpetrators of this unholy mess far more iconic than they ever were in their heyday.

Jim Jones and his All Stars though are long standing disciples of this cause, and they’re ready to grab rock’s nipples if it ever plans on trying to check out for good again.

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