Brother JT
Tornado Juice

Some figures in the USA alternative scene surpass the iconography that belongs to the great "classics" of rock history like Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. Artists in many cases more than prolific, often eccentric figures with personalities as difficult as they are reserved, timeless experimenters like Roky Erickson, Michael Yonkers, Jad Fair, Daniel Johnston, etc., who, in any case, are dedicated to the garage attitude of which Ty Segall or Joh Dwyer today are the successors. These individuals, more than all those bands and artists who release on Sub Pop or Matador, truly preserve that spirit and wild attitude of the origins, and instead of cultivating their own cult, renew the myth of rock and roll.

John Terlesky aka Brother JT (as nicknamed by journalist Byron Coley) was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1962. At the end of the 1980s, he took part in the psychedelic revival and formed the Original Sins with Dan McKinney. The band was inspired by Seeds and 13th Floor Elevators (which John still cites as his main influence) and had a strong garage-punk attitude: the duo became noted over the years for their sound that was as simple as it was extreme, and their wild, provocative, and decidedly over-the-top demeanor. As this endeavor was coming to an end, John, favoring this time a more visionary and free-form approach, began to release completely hallucinatory solo records mostly composed of experimental psychedelic sessions, before "returning" and resuming the interrupted journey with the Original Sins and the fundamentally garage imprinting.

John writes between forty and fifty songs each year and records everything live with the band before proceeding with an overdubbing work at home. For his latest album ("Tornado Juice," Thrill Jockey), he returned to record in the studio after ten years at his friend Ray Ketchem's Magic Door in Montclair, New Jersey. A true psychonaut with a rock and roll heart, the album reiterates that provocative garage attitude with vintage boogie and rock and roll compositions, characterized by his recognizable, unmistakable rudimentary and acid guitar sound, inspired by artists like Lou Reed, Ron Asheton, and Bo Diddley. An instrument - the guitar - that JT, however, says he would have gladly done without and that if he had been able to swivel and there had been someone as tough as him to play it, then he would have preferred to limit himself to singing like Mick Jagger or Tom Jones. A statement that in itself is enough to describe this album and this artist more than many words, which at this point would be superfluous.