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As first impressions go, the North Carolina-based Jolene starts out with two strikes against them. The first, of course, is the moniker, alternately attributed to a band relative and Dolly Parton's classic song of jealous paranoia. |
Either way, it's a cruel name for a quintet of male southern rockers miles closer in sound to the likes of Son Volt than similarly-christened acts like Brandy or Monica, and the type of thing you'd reckon any A&R rep worth their credentials would have remedied. "Sign here boys, welcome aboard, and by the way, lose the cute name, for crissakes."
Then there's the matter of the group's Sire debut, In the Gloaming -- a dense slice of Americana rock which sounds nothing like Brandy but hardly, on the first couple of spins, like anything more than a contender for that purgatory where all good-but-hardly-great albums go to rot, forgotten on the shelf alongside the likes of, say, Cracker.
But something about the album tempts a third listen, a final shot at clemency. Perhaps it's the chilling, quivering opening verse from "Ouisch," or the hushed beauty that envelops the second half of "Begin 1000." It is then that Gloaming sheds its deceptive mediocrity and damn near blindsides you with its true splendor. It's not unlike the sudden rush of pleasure that comes with finally training your eyes to focus on one of those 3-D posters, when the fuzzy flatness suddenly throws a T-Rex right in your front of your face.
"It's slow to digest," admits singer/guitarist John Crooke of Gloaming, confessing that, though he's proud of the album, it doesn't quite represent the full range of Jolene's sound. "For the next record, Dave [Burris, guitarist] and I want to really accentuate the dynamics we've developed over the last year, where the music ends up like a wall of sound or chaos like the Wedding Present or My Bloody Valentine for eight bars, but without losing the intimate part of the band, where there's tons of space around it. I think the chaos and order theory is what we want to achieve."
When Crooke, Burris, bassist Mike Mitschele and drummer Mike Kenerley came together as Jolene in 1995, they were hardly strangers to their trade -- or each other. (Multi-instrumentalist Rodney Lanier is a recent addition.) Crooke, Kenerley and Mitschele had played together in another band, and Burris did time in a New York-based band. Crooke, a seasoned vet on the Southeast music scene, has also logged time as a singer, guitarist, producer and film scorer (he recently finished scoring a friend's film, Dear Jessie, which is scheduled to air next spring on Cinemax). When Crooke called Burris -- his first cousin -- in for some guitar work for an album he was producing for a small Mississippi indie, the proverbial penny dropped.
"We grew up worshipping Echo and the Bunnymen, the Smiths, R.E.M., all these great bands, and pretending we were rock stars while listening to Jethro Tull as kids, but never played in a band together," says Crooke. "And we were literally sitting at the console and we were like, 'Fuck everything else, let's start a band.' And we did."
"I've actually been fronting a band from day one," he continues. "I went to school on a basketball scholarship, quit after a semester, found R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction, and started a band. I played with about 400 different people because nobody was as serious about it as I was. Same old story that I'm sure every rock guy has ... you get to the point where you finally find people that you connect with." "Ouisch is the name of one of the Manson women, who actually didn't participate in any of the murders -- she apparently got out before that," explains Crooke. "That's the one song on the record I didn't write the lyrics to, so if there's parallels to someone in Dave's life, I don't wanna ask ... he's my first cousin, and that's as close as I want to get." RICHARD SKANSE (November 23, 1998)