With the “Holiday Seasonal Affective Disorder Season” now officially upon us no doubt you’ll be needing some down ’n’ dirty ear-shattering brain-pounding skull-scraping consciousness-obliterating rock ’n’ roll to help purge the memory of your Alcoholic Uncle trying to convert you to QAnon and to help with digesting all that leftover cold turkey. But without going cold turkey of course because you’ll wanna down a couple belts of single-barrel bourbon before cranking up Gospel Jamming vol. 1, which is the new rekkid by the avant-punk-freejazz-skronk-jam-band-minus-the-noodle-dancing-power-trio known as The Exorzist III, a rekkid that’ll stuff your skull full of a pulverizing wall of sound that’ll block the ability to mentally process anything other than the glorious cacophony entering your earholes. (just scroll over the graphic directly below to listen).
The Exorzist III is a power trio in its purest form that dispenses with unnecessary frivolities such as having a singer, focusing instead on rhythmically-and-sonically-intense explorations like the 15-minute opening track "Jabber" with its layers of ever-shifting polyrhythms and heavily fuzzed out bass (Von Finger) and alternately-plinky-and-oceanic electric guitar (Drew St. Ivany) all anchored to a triple-time ostinato until it finally climaxes with an all-out tsunami of sound that sees drummer Nick Ferrante riding the crash cymbal like John Bonham suffering from a panic attack and it’s maybe something like the music John Coltrane would’ve made if he’d lived and continued down the path of Interstellar Space but traded his sax for an ax and switched over to playing heavy metal sometime in the ’70s and after all Trane was raised on gospel music so maybe that accounts for the EP’s title.
And then…it just ends. A pattern that holds true for all four songs on Gospel Jamming vol. 1 because clearly The Exorzist III can’t be bothered to write actual endings and no doubt fadeouts are far too gauche so instead they just stop playing whenever they damn well feel like it including on the final track “EVK” which simply lifts the needle off the record and not even on a downbeat. Harsh! It’s somewhat equivalent to a horror movie “jump scare” or maybe more like its polar opposite, but jarring either way, which is maybe how they came up with the name The Exorzist III (besides the power trio factor natch) which savvy readers may notice is only one letter removed from The Exorcist III (1990, dir. William Peter Blatty) a movie that some say has the greatest jump scare in horror history (my vote is for the ending of Carrie but it’s a close call) not to mention the movie features both Fabio and Patrick Ewing in cameo roles playing angels (!) so why it’s not taught in film schools alongside Citizen Kane I can’t explain.
There’s a certain horror soundtrack aesthetic at work elsewhere on the record too. Like on “Coffer” which starts off with a short looped segment of suspense-type music before adding a high-BPM-hardcore-punk beat with the ominous loop still going on underneath and then adding a dissonant guitar that sounds like rusted car pistons grinding metal-on-metal and a throbbing plodding baseline and it’s like the music you’d expect to hear if you were being being chased by The Tall Man from the Phantasm movie series about a creepy elderly mortician who torments his victims with a custom-designed oversized pachinko ball that flies through the air chasing you down long empty corridors until it catches up to your ass and these little blades or drills or circular saws pop out and thrust right into your forehead or eye socket or lower back for chrissakes which is a pretty impressively random way to kill a person so give The Tall Man credit for never doing things the easy way and neither does The Exorzist III and oh yeah he’s the guy on the cover of Gospel Jamming vol. 1 so that’s pretty cool. (Jason Lee)