Jesus Makes The Shotgun Sound enraptured listeners & makes art

For a tiny little place, Synchronicity Space packs a punch. This writer can’t speak to the venue as a gallery, but for music, it’s the jam. Cuddled up in warehouse-like spareness on one of those perfectly crispy L.A. nights that feel like 8 o’clock forever, four bands and a few in the know blended into each other’s darkness like the black on black on black of the blacked out sky when the city lights burn out. On this night, the lights went dark and the music lit us up.

The best thing about a show in a gallery is not only the merging of multiple forms of art but the willingness of the bands to get loose, to make the space theirs for the night, to be more than themselves, to be the art, to be the medium. One F (from San Francisco), War Tapes, Jesus Makes The Shotgun Sound, and VoicesVoices (all LA based) brought us out and made us pay with some tortured exploration and some torrential force and some traditional rock and roll and some transformative lyrical imagery. We hustled free Colt 45 and we listened to it all happening. Sometimes it all happens and you can’t say why but you feel the rolling underneath you and the earth wells up and someone great is born.

The clear standout of the night, hands down, was JMTSS. So raw, so loud, so scientific, these boys do not mess around. Not even a little bit. This is math rock and this is pathos. A fan tells us that we need this music and until we hear it we didn’t know we needed it. Then she says, "But once you have it, you can’t let it go." JMTSS make you need them. With their understated off-stage presence and their tight (as in cool, not ill-fitting) black suits and their intense scrutiny of every last element, this band goes all Mars Volta and all The Dear Hunter with a maniacal speed and precision. In a hyphenated word, they are mind-blowing. Maybe the stars aligned or maybe the other three just weren’t at their best, but JMTSS owned it, claimed it, ate it up and spit it out. Friday was yours, Jesus Makes the Shotgun Sound.

-Angel Baker

Check out our review of DAMNANT QUOD NON INTELLIGUNT EP coming in the print issue of The Deli Magazine at the end of this month.