Jim And The French Vanilla
Afraid Of The House

THE REVIEW

From Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America, a band that gets straight to the point and delivers a revival of sixties and seventies garage music in a literally devastating and hallucinatory manner, as loud and destructive as possible.

Jim And The French Vanilla is a project by Jim Blaha (The Blind Shake), and 'Afraid Of The House' (Dirtnap Records) is practically the first LP of this ensemble after releasing two limited edition and exclusively acoustic albums.

In this project, Jim pushes the heavy-psych sounds of the Blind Shake to the highest level, revisiting a well-established tradition in the history of garage and rock and roll music in the United States starting from the sixties and seventies with bands like Blue Cheer, MC5, The Seeds, The Sonics, mixed with the psychedelia of the 13th Floor Elevators and what would later become the fierceness and 'poses' of Iggy and the Stooges and figures like Richard Hell and Johnny Thunders and the Ramones.

Published a couple of months after the last Blind Shake record, the album is practically a real surge of adrenaline and typically rock and roll and garage energy.

Inside are: catchy riffs ('When You're Down') played at the same speed as bullets fired from a Colt 45, almost anticipating a certain punk-wave rebellion ('I'm Just Sitting Here'); endless psychedelic obsessions ('Back Home', 'Take It To The Grave', 'Grow Like Rabbits'), catchy and danceable sounds ('Not Even War', 'I Have To Slow Down', 'Lonely Man'), acidic minimalist rock-blues ('Eye For An Eye') and hallucinatory mantras like that of 'Psychic Killer'.

The final result is so damn convincing that even if this might, according to many, turn out to be yet another chapter of a movement that already has its champions in musicians and bands like Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin, the Oh Sees, White Fence, Growlers, Night Beats, Murlocs, etc., it still deserves all your attention since more than a real revival, it’s simply the continuation of a certain tradition in American garage and rock'n'roll sound that has never ceased.