Jim Jones All Stars: Ain’t No Peril

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Out twenty ninth September 2023

Jim Jones All Stars launch their debut album, Ain’t No Peril, to a world that maybe didn’t fairly realise how a lot it wanted it. As a group of songs this proves to be a gloriously intense modern-day fusion of among the best sounds which were produced earlier than many people even existed, all delivered with an influence and a soul which solely an artist reminiscent of Jim Jones and his stellar band of musicians might vogue.

It’s typically mentioned that there is no such thing as a substitute for expertise, and that applies to the world of rock’n’roll as a lot as some other career on this planet. So most of the nice artists who’ve influenced those that have adopted of their wake have created their very own music having absorbed a lot of what has preceded them, together with the likes of the Stones, Dylan, Springsteen, Iggy, New York Dolls, The Cramps…..I might go on. That is definitely the case while you consider the profession of Jim Jones who has blended with so most of the nice and the great on this planet of music through the years.

It was a kind of pivotal moments in my life that I can solely put all the way down to destiny when my very own private journey began with Jim Jones music. A fellow music author pointed in the direction of an album within the racks of Jumbo Information in Leeds and instructed me I’d love The Jim Jones Revue, a band who at the moment had been unfamiliar to me. However not for lengthy. Only one hearken to that album made me sit again in a way of awe and marvel at what I had been lacking in my life. Quite a few subsequent reside performances of among the most incendiary rock’n’roll songs I’ve ever heard simply cemented that preliminary view.

Being in attendance on the London Discussion board in 2014 for the Revue’s last showdown, I simply questioned how I used to be going to deal with the musical void that was to comply with. However I didn’t know Jim fairly in addition to I do now, particularly his potential to reinvent himself as he had clearly achieved numerous instances up to now. With Jim Jones & the Righteous Thoughts rising from the ashes of one of many best gigs I’ve ever had the great fortune to expertise, life acquired again on monitor and all was properly on this planet of rock’n’roll once more.

However then with one other merciless coincidence, that dreaded virus erupted throughout the globe, closing down the vast majority of the leisure enterprise for 18 months, making it inconceivable for the Righteous Thoughts to proceed of their current type. However despite all this, alternatives had been nonetheless coming the best way of Jim Jones such that he simply put the feelers out to a bunch of musicians in his cellphone ebook to see if he might put one thing collectively, at the very least within the brief time period. After which, as Jim places it, “Necessity, being the mom of invention, shocked us all when she delivered a wholesome, heavyweight, blue-eyed amalgam of incendiary ramalama soul” and the Jim Jones All Stars had been born. And wow what an influence the All Stars have already had of their comparatively brief time up to now on planet earth.

Jim Jones All Stars have already carried out numerous brief excursions across the UK in addition to past our shores, delivering their distinctive model of rock’n’roll with a stage of swagger, energy, and depth which is sort of unprecedented and definitely unmatched, at the very least on this planet I reside in. They’ve cooked up an virtually evangelical mixture of soul, gospel, blues, storage, rock’n’roll and some other style of music you care to say which is assured to tear down partitions, and this was definitely evident on their final UK tour in Might 2023, together with a present at Manchester’s Night time & Day Café which was merely off the dimensions.

If you wish to know the place a few of this has all come from you solely must hearken to Jim’s assortment of tunes which precede their stroll onto the stage to work it out, together with the likes of The Cramps, Joe Lutcher, Nick Curran & the Nightlifes, Huey “Piano” Smith, Bobby Marchan, Roxy Music, Lee Dorsey and Bo Diddley. And if there are some unfamiliar names there, I actually counsel you verify them out. Fortunately all this has now come collectively within the type of Jim Jones All Stars debut album, Ain’t No Peril, recorded again in 2022 appropriately sufficient in Memphis, down within the deep south of the USA.

Alongside Jim Jones on guitar and vocals, the All Stars comprise former Jim Jones Revue members Gavin Jay (bass) and Elliot Mortimer (piano and keys), drummer Chris Ellul (The Heavy), veteran punk blues guitarist Carlton Mounsher (The Swamps), backing singer Ali Jones and the threeway tenor/baritone sax assault of Stuart Dace, Chuchi Malapersona and Tom Hodges. Though it is a heavyweight bunch of rock’n’roll troubadours there’s little doubting, based mostly on all of the proof put earlier than us right here, that the band as a collective is even larger than the sum of its particular person elements. And that’s saying one thing!

The prehistoric swamp infested beat of the opening music on the album, Satan’s Kiss, tells us the whole lot we have to find out about what’s to return. With a sax weaving out and in of the grooves, a lovely rolling piano, growling vocals and an occasional cow bell, it instantly takes us to the darkish aspect of the rock’n’roll world and its trying prefer it’s going to be fairly a bumpy experience.

Gimme The Grease explodes with a monstrous beat riddled with an enormous dollop of James Brown type funk and soul because the sax wails and drums hold all of it on monitor. It’s the right “ode to getting over/ getting it straightforward/ getting it…..interval” as a result of, sure we get it completely! It’s Your Voodoo Working which follows was the primary single to return from the album and options vocals from Nikki Hill. It’s a music initially written and recorded by Charles Sheffield within the early 60’s and has a sometimes laborious edged rhythm and blues vibe dominated by a grinding beat and impolite horns.

Your Arms Will Be The Heavens is an actual golden nugget on this superb bundle which, while providing a a lot mellower vibe taking in gospel and nation influences, nonetheless retains that underlying depth which is the hallmark of any Jim Jones efficiency. Jim describes the music as “a Leonard Cohen meets Johnny Money-style gunfighter ballad” which “is a darkish music thematically, however actually it’s about ascension… and figuring out that, within the essential life or demise moments, you’ve gotten the ability to decide on what feels true to you, and never essentially what’s been prescribed.” Extra old-fashioned rhythm and blues follows by means of I Need You (Any Means I Can) with blistering guitars, pounding drums and twinkling keys all working in excellent concord.

Sizzling Sauce is the primary of three instrumentals on the album which permit the All Stars to fireside off laborious and free in a carefree and easy groove. The deep-rooted guitar pushed rhythm is overlaid with sax and piano solos which plunder the depths of some basic influences which all come collectively to make the band into the majestic sonic power that they’re. Chingon and Drink Me comply with go well with albeit treading extra of a path in the direction of the funky vibes of James Brown once more, all ramped up in an exquisite cacophony of noise.

Troglodyte is one other chunky providing of soiled funky caveman rock taking this basic novelty funk music from 1972 by Jimmy Castor Bunch and morphing it right into a monstrous groove with the amps turned up the max. While the sentiment inside the lyrics doesn’t align with modern-day values, which Jim is at all times fast to level out when performing it reside, it is a slice of historical past that hits you proper within the face with a thunderous roar.

You Received The Greatest Stink (I Ever Stunk) is one other wild experience by means of the recent and sweaty swamps of Memphis because the horns wail overhead, while title monitor Ain’t No Peril is again to a guitar-driven smouldering slice of rhythm and blues. Evil Eye closes the album in very fantastic type stretching the sonic boundaries of the band to their absolute restrict as they groove and grind, taking in each final breath of the heavy Memphis air that surrounded them of their studio.

As Marc Riley so aptly identified throughout one of many All Stars radio classes, Jim Jones has “one thing of a repute” for “at all times being in the most effective rock’n’roll bands round” and this album, alongside latest reside reveals by the All Stars, proves that for me past any shadow of a doubt. And as producer John Getze noticed, “the entire vibe in Memphis was so infectious” and that vibe definitely bled straight by means of into the grooves on this album which is infused with a uncooked vitality and grit that is able to penetrate anybody’s soul.

On the proof of Ain’t No Peril, it’s fairly clear that the previous, current and way forward for rock’n’roll is true right here and proper now within the arms of Jim Jones All Stars and there ain’t no person prone to wrestle it away from them anytime quickly. And if in case you have acquired this far unscathed, then you need to absolutely need to see them on their UK tour which appears to be like one thing like this:

OCTOBER

13 – Ashcroft Arts Centre, Fareham
20 – The Musician, Leicester
21 – The Con Membership, Lewes
26 – The Earl Haig Membership, Cardiff
27 – The Golden Lion, Bristol
28 – The John Peel Centre, Stowmarket
31 – Whelan’s, Dublin

NOVEMBER

01 – Future Yard, Birkenhead
02 – Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh
03 – The Crescent, York
04 – The Trades Membership, Hebden Bridge
05 – The New Adelphi – Hull
08 – The Discussion board Tunbridge Wells
09 – The Joiners, Southampton
10 – 100 Membership, London

You should buy tickets for the tour right here.

You’ll be able to pre-order the album right here.

Yow will discover Jim Jones All Stars on Fb, Instagram and Bandcamp.

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All phrases and photographs by Ian Corbridge. Yow will discover extra of his writing at his writer profile.