Jesus Christ – Jesus Christ

The other day, Mike slammed pretty hard on a CD by a band called Jesus Christ. Comments following his review were pretty much universally against it.

Of course, you have to know I take this sort of pile-on as a challenge. I teased Mike maybe I’d do a drunk review of it, thinking I’d head to the youtubes and see if they had it. Mike went one better. He emailed me all the songs with this warning: PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

Challenge: Accepted.

So, the drunk review. I am well and far away into my cups at this point. I’m writing this yesterday, on Canada Day, and we sat on the deck and drank wine and listened to the fireworks – we couldn’t see them from here, but couldn’t go down to the show ‘cos the kids were already in bed. So, we heard the explosions from across the Bay. I thought of WWII, people hearing the guns firing in Europe all the way over in England. Probably not appropriate. But then again…

Anyway, I am sufficiently sauced on most of a bottle of a quite excellent merlot, and I’m gonna hear me some Jesus Christ. And here I wonder how many people drank until they heard Jesus Christ… many, probably. Totally a missed marketing ploy there, on this band’s part, that…

Anyway. Onward!

Peace By Piece would so totally have been right up my alley in about 1995. It’s very Alice in Chains. I didn’t have a problem with this.

Bed Of Nails’ intro is almost Ministry (I saw Ministry live, I can swear to it!). The song itself is a driving, stutter-stop thing (like NIN always did better than everyone else), with howling vocals over the top. It’s very… noisy. I liked it!

I Hate has a promising punk-like title. It wants to be Soundgarden, and it can’t, because there already is a Soundgarden. But I can’t fault JC for trying. It’s a pretty good mid-tempo rocker that freaks out at the end.

Censor Me has the time-worn yet still timeless 1-2-3-4 count intro, before blasting into a fairly unchanging wall of noise crash bang boom track. Again, very NIN without the keyboards.

Pity stomps its way into being over a Sabbth-y intro. This is the kid of track that would make a crowd (especially in the 90s) jump up and down. Was this the single? Sounds like it coulda been. Even when it goes to half-speed and tries to crush.

Broken is not a NIN track. It chugs along nicely, though. It’s a like a time capsule of just about every band of the period, perfectly preserved. Again, some Alice In Chain influence here.

Son Of Sam plods along heavily, intent on destruction. It chugs, it wails, it’s very Sabbath-AIC. I kept waiting for him to sing “Sitting in my Angry Chair…” Haha it’s not a bad thing.

Ace Of Spades. Hasn’t every band played this song? Doesn’t matter, it’s awesome no matter who does it. The strength of the song outweighs whatever band tackles it. Here it’s full-on Lemmy impersonation and a decent punk-metal rendition. I caught myself smiling during it.

Memories is pure Alice In Chains. In fact, I had to look and see it wasn’t their song. The vocals here are overwrought, but the band rocks well enough. Remembering that this was 1994, I’d say this was a pretty damn good track.

Find Yourself is another heavy metal plodder with howler vocals. It’s actually a strong album closer.

In Sum:

You can blame the wine if you want, I actually rather liked this! The way to survive it was to try to put yourself into where you were in 1994 (me, I was in university), and this would really have scratched a lot of itches for me.

One of the comments Mike had was about poor production. Sure, it’s kinda shitty sounding, but to me that’s just one of the charms. Remember, I’ve got lots of albums (punk included) where the sound was way worse than this.

Anyway, yes. It’s a lot of wanting to be other bands – AIC, Soundgarden – but it’s not a bad thing. Listening to this I wondered how one howler vocalist grunge metal band got famous when another didn’t… it’s beyond me.

This may be the only time I ever type this on the KMA, but I liked Jesus Christ. You can all go ahead and laugh. I don’t care. I’m drunk. But not drunk enough to be writing this just to take the piss, nor am I so out of it that my judgement is questionable. I’d listen to this CD, or at least put a track here or there in a mix. Sure, why the hell not? It was 1994. It was what it was. If it is $0.99 when we go to Taranna, I’m rescuing one and giving it a good home.

And ya know something else? If we’d seen this band perform these songs live in 1994? We’d all be fans right now, and they’d still be playing. These songs were built for a live setting.

PROCEED WITH CAUTION? Nah. Proceed to get your grunge metal on. This worked fine for me.