release date: Sep. 1993
format: cd
[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,58]
producer: Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Peer Rave
label: Solid Records - nationality: USA
Track highlights: 1. "Lucky Jim" - 2. "A House Is Not a Home" - 3. "Cry to Me" - 6. "Idiot Waltz" - 7. "Up Above the World" - 8. "Day Turn the Night" - 10. "Desire" - 11. "Anger Blues"
6th and final studio album by The Gun Club follows 3 years after Pastoral Hide & Seek (Oct. 1990), 2 years after the Divinity (ep), and 1½ years after the Jeffrey Lee Pierce project-album Ramblin' Jeffrey Lee & Cypress Grove with Willie Love (Mar. 1992). Since the 1990 album, The Gun Club has been reduced to a trio as guitarist Kid Congo Powers left to pursue his own project-band, Congo Norvell. The trio here consists of Jeffrey Lee Pierce on vocals and guitar, Romi Mori on bass, and with Nick Sanderson on drums, who once again had been out, but returned for this.
You could argue that the band's style hasn't evolved much since The Las Vegas Story from 1984 but as practically no-one else sounds quite like The Gun Club, nor like Jeffrey Lee Pierce, that's not really something you could hold against them. The garage rock and bluesy rawness has subsided somewhat on the account of an old-school Hendrix-like guitar-founded blues rock tone. In an interview with Louder, Pierce's girlfriend Romi said, she found that Pierce became increasingly obsessed on playing the guitar - he had a Hendrix-thing going on, and she felt it took away some of the qualities in his vocal performance [Louder interview, also with Kid Congo Powers]. The relationship between Pierce and Romi is said to have come to an end during the recordings of the album, which didn't make things easier. Pierce's lacking health saw him hospitalised several times and he has been described as hallucinating more than usually. Musical simplicity, however, remains on the album and there's still an edgy tone to the music and the fragile / desperate voice of Pierce is found on top of all compositions. It's by no means poor or mediocre, I just miss that unspecified greatness in larger doses, which is something else than melancholic despair, but the album surely has its moments - and then it reveals a new level of guitar skills, which here is handled by Pierce.
A year later, Pierce and Romi had split for good - she now befriended Sanderson and together they founded the band Freehat (around 1999) with ex-members Jim Reid and Ben Lurie of The Jesus and Mary Chain. Pierce relocated to the US, to his father's house and to him to be looked after in the attempts of sobering up. Here, Pierce managed to write his memoirs, and he also made attempts in early '96 of finding new musicians to reform The Gun Club, which never materialised, and in late March, three years following Lucky Jim, Jeffrey Lee Pierce himself called it a day, as he was found dead - his body gave in, posssibly resulting from a life-style that included long-time heroin addiction and with various deceases as side-effects.
Lucky Jim is not the band's best, nor its worst. It's a genuine The Gun Club-album and as such quite fascinating stuff. Lee Pierce had been a youngster dreaming of being someone doing wild things, or actually: he wanted very much to become someone like William S. Burroughs, or Charles Bukowski, more than a rock'n'roll- icon. He wanted to be be out there living his life as a drunk and as a heroin addict, simply because he idolised that lifestyle on the extreme edge. He soon ended there himself and never really came back. People around him were shocked, petrified, or struck by his otherness, his vigor, his appetite, and his ramblings - and no matter what, he left us with enduring original fine music.
"No one sings the blues like Jeffrey Lee". [ ♱Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Jun. 27, 1958 - Mar. 31, 1996 ]
[ allmusic.com 4 / 5 stars ]
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