From L.A. Record.Jesus Makes The Shotgun Sound's most recent EP is full of the kinds of surprises that in the wrong hands can be infuriating. While other bands that attempt similar eclecticism come off sounding like they are reaching further than their talents grant them license, Jesus Makes The Shotgun Sound manage to layer it so organically and with such brilliant sense of texture and mood that it never feels forced. Take opening track "Do not the clothes make the man!?!" Beginning with haunting minor key synthesizer triplets straight from the Martin Gore fake book - in fact, I'll give you the exact song: "Little 15," one of Depeche Mode's underrated best - the melody is joined by heavily processed vocals before opening into "Paranoid Android"-style acoustic strumming and anxious drums. "Ah," you'll say, "this sounds like
OK Computer, but with a little more bad-trip paranoia undercurrents." Then you notice the bedrock undercurrent of industrial tinkering, as though Einsturzende Neubauten was practicing in the upstairs apartment and the sounds bled through. And did Regine Chassagne drop by for ten seconds to hammer on piano? Suddenly, after about three minutes, the song switches into a sludge-heavy fuzzed-out Cossack folk tune for a moment, like Black Sabbath playing "Bubak and Hungaricus." Then strings, back to Europe for the coda... and scene. And that's the first track. The rest of the album continues in much the sam vein (track 3, "(as we step out unto) the Moonlit Landerous" effectively melds Air's Virgin Suicides soundtrack and the Unicorns' "Tuff Ghost" with a hi-fi [but drunk... 'weepy' drunk] Olivia Tremor Control), complete with an eight-minute cover of Lee Hazelwood's "My Autumn's Done Come" that wouldn't sound out of place on the last 1/3 of
The Wall.
This band should be playing Disney Hall with the combined force of the L.A. Philharmonic behind them. Listen to this album soon.
From Anthem Magazine: By Artemisa Clark.
Here's the scene at the Mountain Bar in LA's Chinatown: pale, lanky guys with well-groomed mustaches and vests; young women with hair like mermaids, dressed in the latest Margiela, or at least a good knock-off; everyone gathered in a dimly-lit room that's been painted to look as though each individual tile on the wall is bleeding. Probably the most neo-goth I’ve felt in ages. The occasion is a performance by
Jesus Makes The Shotgun Sound, five dirty young men from the wasteland where I'm sure people move to kill others, a.k.a. the Inland Empire. Once the band starts playing, each individual member becomes slightly more than mortal; they're tentacles on some sort of mortally wounded cephalopod.
The haunting “DoNotTheClothesMakeTheMan” provides a soundtrack for the creature’s initial descent. Band mates are pretty much
writhing with whatever instrument they happen to be playing; long hair hangs in front of their faces, providing masks to cover eyes that never once connect with the audience. I feel like I’m getting emotional during a sci-fi film or an Abramović performance. How am I being tricked into mourning this fictional creature’s death?
Once Jesus Makes The Shotgun Sound's louder—as in really, really, deafeningly loud—songs start, I feel less ashamed of my near-tears. I almost can't resist the urge to start writhing a bit myself; it's obvious that my emotions aren't being manipulated by any run-of-the-mill dudes in their 20s. The guitar player hops around like a fairy on acid. The drummer literally moves more intensely than Animal from
The Muppets. The band-cum-creature may be losing its battle, each limb spiraling more and more out of control, but this is one death I am excited to witness.
In the middle of the set, a friend of mine who’s never before had the pleasure of viewing Jesus Makes the Shotgun Sound, turns back to me and exclaims “Jesus writes!” My sentiments exactly.
From I.E. Weekly.Band of the week: Jesus Makes The Shotgun Sound.
By Phil Fuller.
Most post-rock or proggy rock bands blur the line bteween boredom and apathy just enough to get away with pushing album after album of formulaic songs that strive to be a dissertation on the State of Mopey Nation, but instead end up more like a third grade science project. The songs are interesting enough, but they don't seek to stand out - like that year everyone made volcanoes out of Play-Doh, vinegar, and baking soda.
Riverside's Jesus Makes The Shotgun Sound doesn't bring a volcano that daddy helped them make - they don't need daddy's help. Instead, they bring a sonic treatise on the nature of perennial heavyheartedness, and they made it themselves.
Rather than attempting to impress elitists with their aural exposition, the band focuses on weaving a tight, intricate web of harmonic progressions, and haunting melodies that convery raw, unprocessed, unrefined emotion. Generally spacey and ethereal, the band is equally adept at dishing out anxious, squealing guitar as they are at providing an intricate, weepy soundtrack for the broken hearted.
This is essentially sad music, but Jesus Makes The Shotgun Sound lack the pretense of most perenially low-spirited bands. Their music doesn't strive to be anything it's not, nor does the band pretend that its gloom is universally epic, although their valiant use of strings and layered vocal harmonics - think Gregorian chants - might give that impression.
The band's music is in the avant-garde vein, but at its heart beats a pacifying sonic portrait of the saturnine soul that even the most ardent adherent to musical structures can percieve.
From The Stranger. [Seattle]
One of the forefront bands in a tremendously tight-knit and fertile young scene centered in L.A. County's Inland Empire, Jesus Makes the Shotgun Sound make music that exists on the perpetual frontier of maximum rock epicness. Hosting three guitarists and vocals from nearly all members, JMTSS emit the impression of one hulking musical organism, adept at both Morricone/
OK Computer—style grandeur and the sort of skin-crawling psychedelic undercurrents that only the City of Angels can produce. Tourmates and fellow I.E. scenemakers Holy Curtain cut a more arch row. They deliver rhythmically palpitating art punk overlayed with a deeply wine-stained, Nick Cave—esque sensibility. A tiny capsule of what their vibrant, growing scene has to offer, these dudes should bring the drama in spades. SAM MICKENS
From LastFm.
Post-modern free-jazz experimental weirdness from the outermost depths of the cosmos. One release under their collective belt (a 24 minute EP of cathartic noise and dissonant heaviness in a very chaotic punk-ish atmosphere), and (if their recent live performances are any indication)a sure-to-be epic and mindbending LP in the works. Spaced-out melancholia and intense grandiosity combine with Beatlesque melody in a progressive vein to create one of the only "original" sounds anywhere right now.