JPT Scare Band - The sound is the message

Tanti aspiranti Nuovi Critici che pasteggiano su internet fanno carte false per qualche remota intervista via mail o due frammentate chiacchiere telefoniche con l’eroe di turno; o per l’esclusiva della recensione dell’ultimo dico super pop che domina il momento presente da postare sul portale più figo della rete.

Non che io abbia avuto chissà quali occasioni di frequentare questo jet-set, ma ammetto che in contesti diversi dal blog, ho avuto le mie possibilità (come tutti, ormai).

Insomma, non me ne è mai fregato nulla.

Però quando la JPT Scare Band mi contatta e mi fa i complimenti per un articolo, inserendo il link nella loro home page, io sono contento.

E non per il link, o per la visibilità (e chi cazzo se la fila la Scare Band…); perché è la prova definitiva che la JPT Scare Band esiste.

Chi sono costoro? Nessuno lo sa, quindi non divulgate il segreto, mi raccomando. Se siete curiosi, se ne parla un pochino qui:

http://theevilmonkeysrecords.blogspot.it/2013/03/jpt-scare-band-il-nulla-al-di-fuori-del.html

Così, per ringraziare di questo contatto virtuale, ho promesso che avrei tradotto il mio articolo in inglese per loro…

Ed eccoci qui.

JPT Scare Band - The sound is the message

Since the early '70s, from Kansas City’s anonymous suburbs.

Always together. Always playing in that same dreadful basement.

Locked in, as for a conclave for Rock Holiness, with swarms of Death's-head Hawk moth all around and Buffalo Bill hidden in the dark, with a knife in his hand.

Gloriously unknown to all, even unpublished (UNPUBLISHED, 0 LP, 0 singles) until the mid-90s, Paul Grigsby (bass), Jeff Littrell (drums) and Terry Swope (guitar) are the Supreme Invisibles.

Much more than Zerfas or Granicus.

A band that does not exist .

Forget Helios Creed and Randy Holden. Forget even Keiji Haino, the Sleep and Earth's second album. Forget Neil Young’s Dead Man

Hell yes! The JPT Scare Band has existed.

They did not care a shit about writing songs. They only interested in playing.

Their songs are simply, continuous, repeated, insistent, verbose, insane, solos. Solos. In unison. Bass, drums, guitar. No verse, no bridge, no chorus. A total dedication to the free-form, so extreme that rivals a Braxton or a Roscoe Mitchell.

Imagine a Cream’s single reproduced with the turntable lever on “33”: inflated, extended, warped, wounded .

Sang with the mellifluous indifference of those who speak to a crowd of deaf locked up in some mental hospital designed by the Terry Gilliam of Twelve Monkeys. The JPT materializes itself, projected back in time, as the bewildered Bruce Willis trying to save the world by the pandemic. Without win.

The sum of this parts is almost a Grand Funk Live played through Sleep’s Holy Mountain, who greedy sucking that quaalude stick left in the pocket for over twenty years. Beefheart’s Mirror Man traced by a an Hendrix most stoned of that who played so loudly in Woodstock.

The only plausible benchmarks are sauropods as Amboss, by Ash Ra Tempel, and especially that Population II by Randy “The Mystic” Holden, but completely devoid of cosmic wandering and capricious aura of Lost Guru in favor of a grin and a syringe like sidewalk thugs. And with a bass guitar that looks really struck by a giant Hartmut Enke from the Deep South, a Left-Handed Titan of Deep Wave that borrows the most staggered licks of Jack Casady in Saturday Afternoon to make a drone at the same time huge in sound and rousing in rhythm: King Rat is its absolute testament. Death metal from the chasm, deformed by Afghan smoke and LSD like rain; thrown impunity into the water of the last city in the country.

Mr. Littrell’s drums carves out a space that is an out-of-tune autopsy in the background; could fit in another framing, in another set on the opposite side of the globe, as he strays without a leash, as he slam on right and left as a coffin that falls from the stairwell of the Empire State Buiding.

Over such rhythm section, might seem easy for Terry Swope to deploy a punk fury combined with an acid unknown perseverance, with volume unknown and with a feeling that is blues of inspiration, absolutely metal of attitude, that never denies the taste of the ultra-macho clichés, but is also so verbose to submerge each possible bore with tidal avalanches of exasperating feedback.

Songs of a quarter of an hour that elapse quickly and pleasant like a fuck on the back of a Camaro, a part for that wake up in a strange motel on the other side of the State, while a big bedbug trots on your belly.

Wha-wha declined in all kinds of shapes, regardless of opportunity, time, and without any inhibitions. The James Gang’s Funk # 48 locked in a bronze bell that sinks into the abyss, while the Summer of Love Veterans are misfits beggars, who beg a dose at the entrance of the old Fillmore. But the door is boarded up since years.

There’s no salvation for the inmates in the rural communes, for the Guru of free love, for the yippie theorists; Billy and Captain America are gone with their load of "stuff".

Traces of Black Sabbath, prostitutes for acid and deny any God, especially that one old, evil , with a white beard and a son full of problems.

A forest of metal strings as the High Tide’s Electric Violin and Gibson, woven together in a single mephistophelean instrument, who feed a jungle through which we proceed only with a machete that shouts funky languors and drugs perhaps unknown even to the most extreme Funkadelic and to the Guess Who’s Reaper.

And Jerrys ' Blues should be a kind of whitish slow from West Side Chicago? Or just the last bootleg of some wandering wasp lost in Maxwell Street? Really they want us to believe they know what the blues is? With those final minutes when the song degenerates into a blast furnace of industrial NWOBHM?

They have certainly heard sometimes the blues, on the radio, when Clapton, Bruce and Baker were still on the same stage. Almost ten years later, the JPT is still there, on the same frequency. Fantastic!

But when it start a musical insult as Rape Of Titan 's Sirens the daze is served. And the confusion, too.

When you get to the middle of Acid Acetate Excursion you will be hopelessly lost in a maze with no exit, perhaps without the Minotaur, certainly without the thread. There are echoes of the very latest Hendrix’s Fender, that one more black, intransigent, the Hyper-Funky Gypsy. There are echoes of an instrument buried such as the tomahawk of a cherokee chief of which Ku Klux Klan has erased memory and honor. There is no melody, no musical idea. But there is not even the pure noise of Metal Machine Music or certain Fushitsusha. There’s nothing of the transcendental meditation of Earth 2.

There’s the total expansion of the most anarchist ideas of a bastard Kaukonen, mixed with some kraut-rockers landed roughly on the progressive needs of Blues Creation or Flower Travellin ' Band.

This, and a filthy suburban pub where perform two nights out of three, with the same four whores who listen to you before start their shift. On the floor, stains of beer, blood and sperm.

And don’t look for a meaning in Time To Cry or Sleeping Sickness. Because there’s no meaning there.

Spirals that leave behind that aftertaste of chemical rot, as in a dream of a decadent Detroit without any salvation, in which the struggle for the Sacrosanct Human Rights has given way to a fragmented scene of illegal Fight Clubs where early yuppies vent testosterone without cause or ideology.

When the shortest track, in a catalog that rarely drops below 10 minutes, are the 90-seconds-90 of It's Too Late - madness backwords incomprehensible, pointless, nihilistic, falsely psychedelic – then, it’s clear.

The sound is the message.

Who cares about content.

P.S. Due righe di news…

Terry Swope, il chitarrista del gruppo, ha pubblicato, nel giugno 2013 un album solista, No TV. Non ho avuto occasione ancora di ascoltarlo, ma il titolo, devo ammettere, è niente male…

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/terryswope