Description
Vinyl copy of the debut The Jesus Bolt album – The Kid Got Electric. Limited to just 100 copies.
Review by Ged Babey at Louder Than War: https://louderthanwar.com/the-jesus-bolt-the-kid-got-electric-album-review/
Northerners living in Bristol, both ex-Blue Aeroplanes guitarists. Former frontman with Witness, Gerard Starkie and co-pilot with Flux Capacitors, Hazel Winter are the Jesus Bolt. After some interesting EP’s comes a bewildering album. Ged Babey tries to be objective about the crazy-cat-lady and her trophy-toy-boy who happen to be two very fine songwriters indeed.
Forget what I said in that bar / I think I must’ve gone too far / but the cat got the cream / and the kid got an electric guitar
This is a hard album to describe…. Genre-fluid (Alternative blues, skiffle-folk, bohemian art-pop …?) It’s a difficult album, which takes a few listens. Great songs but some tough subject matter and odd detours…
Hazel and Gerard are a couple as well as a musical unit. They haven’t been together for that long – despite having known each other for some time. They were both guitarists in Blue Aeroplanes at one time or other. They live together, make music both together and separately. Despite having a now full-grown cat still-called The Kitten of Love, this isn’t a lovey-dovey relationship album. It’s more the couple telling each other stories about their pasts and jamming until they become fully fledged songs. I wandered through, the collected memories of you ….sings Starkie at one point.
Hazel Winter is pretty much an open-book because of her previous artistic output: Solo albums, ‘Bleak’ Blogs, poems and her Flux Capacitors songs tell the stories of her life: from suicidal thoughts (Telephone Triage Assessment) to tales of touring and support slots where they nicked other bands riders… and everything in between. All told with a wicked sense of gallows humour.
Gerards songs seem more lyrically vague, descriptive but non-specific. He has a fantastic singing voice – clear and tunefully enunciated. Hazel varies between fast-paced semi-spoken narration and folky harmonising. They work well together and the songs are fascinating, beautiful and strange. There is a fair bit of melancholy and less of the black humour that runs through Flux Capacitors songs.
There are four Winter lyrics and six by Starkie but he told me “Hazel wrote the lyrics to the verse she sings No Ghosts In Blackrod and I wrote the lyrics to the middle eight I sing in Flaming Car.”
Blackrod is a place in Bolton it seems, I asked Hazel about the song:
Starkie grew up in Blackrod, which, all I know about is his take on it. Weirdly as with all the stuff of his he’s given me, when he jammed it through I instinctively harmonised on it even though I’ve never thought of myself as a harmony singer. Then all these old guitar riffs I’d played years ago but which I’d given up on cuz I could never make them work, sort of popped out. And they worked. Then we were on a roll and he asked me to write a verse which I’ve never done on anybody else’s song before and it felt dead weird…
The lyrics throughout the album are great: full of lovely old expressions like ‘Who’s ‘she’ the cats mother?’ More modern ones: Post-It Notes with Life-affirming quotes. and ‘Take it as read. Delete that thread. And neat turns of phrase: Less a nightmare, more a dream gone wrong if you-ask-me.
Musically it’s a bit of folk, blues, hippy-jamming and occasional art-school dissonance – not really my post-punk specialist area – but the strength of the song lyrics and blending of their voices make the Jesus Bolt compulsive listening. And I like the bits where they sound like the Velvet Underground. A Suitable Disguise has a guitar solo which sounds like Robert Quine playing with Dire Straits! Another song called Locals has a guitar solo which sounds like it is being strangled.
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