Though their early EPs are tributes to unsung artists like Marc Bolan or Melvin Van Peebles, John Wilkes Booze will never be mistaken for their idols-- vocalist Seth Mahern's delivery is too anemic and weird to be anything but avant-garde. Unfortunately, his voice is too often the most interesting texture on their latest album, Telescopic Eyes Glance the Future Sick.
The band's experimental excursions are compelling, but their strangeness isn't incorporated across the board. The rhythm section (including the Impossible Shapes' Chris Barth on bass) is consistently creative and sharp, but there aren't any riffs here a high-school pick-up band couldn't handle-- straightforward blues-rock with a hammer-on here, a seventh chord there. Small touches like the hair-tugging single-note bends in between the verses on "War Drums", the atonality under the riffs in "Cultural Hurricane" or "Erasing Animals", the arctic isolation in "Gonna Die Tonight", or the mildly unsettling spoken word call-and-response on "The Rattler" rattle expectations, but there are too few of these moments. Often, they're made to stand and face the corner while the guitars strut. Lengthier tracks like the formless two-note jam "Can't Take It" or the dubby drum circle of "Heliocentric Views, Pt. 2" are the exception to the rule.
The revolutionary sentiments in Mahern's lyrics are just as banal ("Blowin' up the government was never so much fun," "corporate images are burning your brain," "the self-appointed king...will die"), but they capture something other revivalists often omit. Simple as they may be, they revere the idea that this music aspired to be a vehicle for change and dissent as well as a carefree good time. It's like John Wilkes Booze have dug up a time capsule and added their reflections on the present day-- uncertainty in the lyrics, chaos in the squalls of noise just behind the archaic licks-- before burying it again. It's a noble tribute, but not quite a resurrection.
