The Bern-based band has just released their latest album, Queen of the Pill (Voodoo Rhythm Records), and if straight-up fuzz-filled garage punk is your thing, you’ll have something to blast from your car stereo that’s right up your alley.
Musically, there's no real big mystery here. The band expertly straddles a line between the time-honored sound of 50 year-ago West-Coast fuzz with one foot, and the fury of early-’70s Detroit on the other.
The Jackets are fronted by singer and sometime performance artist Jack Torera (aka Jackie Brutsche), whose eyeliner-on-crack make-up makes her immediately the noticeable member of the band.
But musically there’s nothing weird or esoteric about her no-nonsense garage punk powerhouse singing style. Her hook-driven guitars also help propel the band’s sound. Giving said sound an even bigger boost are the pounding beats from LA expatriate Chris Rosales and a bottom held together perfectly by bassist Samuel "Schmidi" Schmidiger.
Behind the glass, the album also benefits from the presence of Nene Baratto and King Khan, who has previously logged production time with the band.
The album is chock-full of up-tempo rockers, avalanches of great hooks and pounding beats, with nary a clunker to be heard. And while you’re fist-pumping to the myriad hooks, it might be easy to not notice the solid lyrical dimension also contained in the songs.
It would be tough to pick out a best song, since the whole album rocks like crazy. Traditional garage-leaning tunes like “Steam Queen” feature the best hooks on the collection. The same could easily be said for “Don’t Leave Me Alone.”
There are also a slew of songs that showcase the band’s punkier impulses.”Move On” snarls convincingly. The title song has Torera at her most menacing and the rest of the band at its most rocking while “Deeper Way” channels the ferocity of Los Angeles legends X. "Loser's Lullaby" is about as sneery as a garage-punk song can get.
“Floating Alice” is the lone downtempo (such as it is for this band) cut, a nice early-psychedelic groove that allows you to catch your breath without boring you.
The album closes out with appropriately defiant echoes of Ray Davies on “Be Myself.” With Queen of the Pill the Jackets have put out an album that, if there’s any justice, will rock the garage-punk community -- and beyond.
There are always new features in the works here at Garagerocktopia. Artists have been sending us some very cool stuff. We can’t make any guarantees in stone, but we’re happy to spread the word when we can about about the artists and bands that are playing the groovy kinds of music we profile here. Send us a line and we’ll talk.
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Also, we do have a Facebook page for this blog. We don’t put personal stuff on it – no pictures of grandkids or our dinners or politics or anything like that. What we do post are announcements about upcoming features, maybe extra stuff about the bands, links to podcasts and radio shows featuring our kinds of music and any other cool music, movies or TV Shows we stumble across that might have even the most tangential connection with the music featured here. While we don't spend all day thinking about it, we do like "likes" if you're so inclined ...
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