Warlocks
The creative arc of the Warlocks–who for a few years were very, very close to the Grail–can be instructive on this point. Front man Bobby Hecksher did a stint with the Brian Jonestown Massacre before starting the Warlocks in 1998, and like the BJM’s the band’s early records were ambitious and grating and joyously, dorkishly energetic, like college boys waxing rhapsodic about opium. They might have just been applying fuzz to pop songs all dressed up in black and love beads with nowhere to go other than someone else’s dorm room, but they did so better than anyone since the Jesus and Mary Chain. If nothing else “Shake the Dope Out,” from The Phoenix Album (Birdman, 2002), is the best entry in the “Sister Ray”-lite category I’ve heard in ten years, and there’s been a fair amount of competition. But with their newest release, Surgery, they’ve gone a bit off the rails, and I’m not sure it can be chalked up to “maturity.”
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