Jane's Addiction find new artistic life on The Great Escape Artist
By Matt Ashare
"I'm a hustler/I'll never give up the underground," sings Perry Farrell in his patented snarling croon at the start of "Underground," the opening track of The Great Escape Artist (Capitol), only the fourth studio album his band Jane's Addiction have released in 23 years, and their first since 2003's subpar Strays. Even if he's just role-playing, it's still one of the more honest, revealing, and accurate lines he's ever written. Because, no matter what you think of Farrell, he's always been as much a schemer as singer, going all the way back to the early days of Jane's Addiction, when he and the band's founding bassist Eric Avery conceived of an art-damaged answer to the spandexed metal that ruled Sunset Strip in the ’80s, recruited two hard-rock castaways (drummer Stephen Perkins and guitarist Dave Navarro), and hit a crucial nerve with the aptly titled 1988 modern classic Nothing's Shocking. That album and 1990's Ritual de lo Habitual were, at the very least, instrumental in laying the groundwork for the alternative explosion spearheaded by Nirvana in ’91. Jane's didn't stick around much longer to reap the considerable rewards of the mainstreaming of the underground. By late ’91, with the departure of Avery and Navarro, they’d broken up. But a good hustler is always working on his next big idea, and Farrell's was a brilliant one: in the summer of ’91 he helped inaugurate the first Lollapalooza, a traveling festival of alternative artists that Jane's Addiction headlined as a de-facto farewell tour. Not a bad way to go out, especially since it left Farrell at the creative/conceptual helm of an institution that came to define the alternative ‘90s. Not all of Farrell's schemes have panned out quite so well. When he tired of Lollapalooza, Farrell dreamed up something of a rock-meets-rave twist on the festival tour, christened it ENIT, and brought his new band, the Jane's-lite Porno for Pyros, along for what turned out to be a bumpy, and ultimately short-lived run in ’95/’96. (Of course, by the following year, in the absence of Farrell's curatorial prowess, Lollapalooza had more or less run its course.) And his 2005-2007 experiment with Satellite Party, a new-agey collective that included wife Etty Lau Farrell, ex-Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt, and, at various times, Fergie of Black Eye Peas, New Order bassist Peter Hook, and members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, was perhaps a tad too ambitious to properly get off the ground. Through it all, Jane's have loomed in the backdrop, reuniting from time to time with various bassists — Flea in ’97, Porno for Pyros' Martyn LeNoble (2001-2004), and, most recently, Avery (2008-2010) – mostly as a festival-ready nostalgia act, performing fan faves from their ’80s albums. The notion that they might ever match the raw power and artful majesty of Nothing's Shocking in the studio seemed, at best, improbable. But Farrell, the hustler, has once again pulled off a major artistic coup, largely by looking to the “underground” for a fresh muse. When Avery once again jumped ship last year, he brought former Guns ’N Roses/Velvet Revolver bassist Duff McKagan on board to write songs for a new album. When that didn’t work out, he drafted an unlikely collaborator, multi-instrumentalist David Sitek of Brooklyn’s TV On the Radio. Sitek proved to be more than just a fill-in bassist: he co-wrote seven of the disc’s ten tracks, added guitar, keyboards, and programming to the sessions, and assisted in the production. In fact, it wouldn’t be going too far to say that, with the exception of Farrell’s unmistakable vocals, Sitek’s aesthetic — a masterful marriage of digitalized electro-organic instrumentation, deep beats, and soaring melodies — is the dominant force on The Great Escape Artist. “End to the Lies,” the first of two singles that have already been released, begins, in typical TV On the Radio fashion, with a deliberate, pounding drumbeat emerging from a quiet storm of electronic interference before a thundering bass line and churning guitars come crashing in. Farrell, who’s been perfectly willing to toss off a provocative line or two in the past, sounds positively inspired as he bites into verses like, “You never really change like they say/You only become more like yourself/He thought he knew me back in the day/When I was down, but now it’s him crying help.” Navarro, who’s always been a Sunset Strip shredder at heart, gets his licks in, but he’s equally in tune with crafting sinuous hooks and layering dark textures of feedback and distortion. And somewhere in the mix, Perkins’ pounding percussion is abetted by Morocco’s Master Musicians of Joujouka. Sitek has a true talent for making the complex sound surprisingly simple, for pushing sonic boundaries in remarkably accessibly directions. “Irresistible Force (Met the Immovable Object),” the second single, is practically a study in Sitek science. A sinister bassline circles a syncopated groove as synths and programming flutter and drone in the backdrop, and Farrell drops his voice an octave to offer an apocalyptic vision of romance. “We didn’t know that it would blow up with such might,” he intones, “We stars are even brighter/Contrasted with the night.” It may not be profound, but it’s more than effective. The tune takes a turn for the epic on a soaring chorus filled with swelling synths and looming powerchords, and, after a Sitek synth solo, Navarro lets loose with what might be some of his most tasteful guitar heroics to date. There are familiar echoes of classic Jane’s in the sordid story from the wrong side of romance that is “Twisted Tales,” which finds Farrell playing the role of a less than honest lover who’ll say anything “To fit in, and yes get in bed with you.” And the acoustic guitar-based “Broken People” reprises some of the same mellow drama as “Jane Says,” as Farrell declaims, “Welcome to the world/Welcome to the aching world/A woeful world of broken people.” McKagan gets a writing credit here, but Sitek’s presence is still felt in the subtle atmospherics that accentuate the song’s pathos. If imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery, then I think I know how the guys in TV On the Radio are feeling right about now.
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