JUNKPILE JIMMY - Wants You Dead
November 2, 2018, 5 years ago
(Cartel Illustre)
I steer far away from gimmicky stuff in metal—guys doing covers with banjos? No, thanks. So when info about Junkpile Jimmy—a metal band who use slide guitar as a focal point—crossed my inbox, I was ready to hit a quick “delete.” But because I’m not always a complete asshole, I checked them out and, well, here we are, because this is worthy of at least a quick conversation.
Opener “Existential Dread” creates a mood, it being a sort of sludgey intro, and, man, the slide works wonders here, actually, bringing the listener down to the bayou where all kinds of horrible Eyehategod-influenced things just might happen. And the next song delivers on that promise, “Shed Blood Total War” being a super frantic mixture of blackened sludge and, yup, slide-infused thrash. The slide actually works, and it works great. Throughout the album, sometimes the rest of the song in question doesn’t hold up to the slide, degenerating to generic local-band thrash at points. I’d like to see a bigger emphasis on the sludge with the slide work. Then there’s stuff like “Priest Of Set”, which really makes me feel like I’m watching the local opener band down at the sports bar, that drum beat, that riff, those vocals, nothing really jiving except (!) for the slide, which is actually pretty great. Elsewhere, I’m reminded of GWAR (which, unless you’re GWAR, probably shouldn’t happen), and, this is good, total weirdo demo-level psychologically-warped-guy solo music that creates its own genre. Unfortunately, lots of the songs just flounder and end up forgettable, and there’s the unexpected rub: the concept actually works, Junkpile Jimmy just need to work on everything around it. Which is a surprising, and welcome, twist.