Jess and The Ancient Ones: The Dark Consumes The Light
The 60s and 70s was a time when for many, music truly came alive. Musicians ditched the parent-friendly looks and grew their hair long, donned flares, put flowers in their hair, and shouted peace not war. The world saw the most iconic festival to date, Woodstock, open its gates to hundreds of thousands of attendees. People opened their mind to the more psychedelic realms that life had to offer. JANIS JOPLIN, JIMI HENDRIX, LED ZEPPELIN, PINK FLOYD, the list is endless with names of musicians who were beacons of the future for music. Of course, at the time, they didn’t know that, but to this day, their sounds have inspired bands. One particular band from Finland have taken the influence and cranked it up to an otherworldly level, JESS AND THE ANCIENT ONES. The psychedelic rock band have recently released their new album, Vertigo, so we sat with guitarist Thomas Corpse about the inspiration behind the album and just how much influence these decades have had on their sound.
Vertigo, is considered by Corpse as the brother to the band’s previous release, The Horse & Other Weird Tales, but on the darker side. This is noticeable when you take tracks such as Summer Tripping Man for example. The sound is in the usual upbeat psychedelic vibe in which JESS AND THE ANCIENT ONES provide, but the subject matter and the music video by Giuliano di Girolamo tell a darker story. “I had this vision that I would like an animated video with this kind of style that I used to see on the television when I was a child back in the 80s,” Corpse explains.
“So, this kind of really old school black and white pencil handmade stuff, so I just started searching through our band Instagram account for certain hashtags. I found Giuliano on there and I contacted him and I liked his style and asked if he would make a video for us. He was really excited from the beginning.” Continuing, “the name kind of reflects the Summer Tripping Man kind of counterculture mindset from the 60s. There was this cold war going on, they had the A-bombs and so it kind of spawned this hippie culture kind of resistance mindset and that’s kind of the title of the song, Summer Tripping Man, the mindset against the teams that destruct.”
It isn’t just the influence of past political events that inspire the nature of JESS AND THE ANCIENT ONES‘ sound however. Whilst Corpse admits to always being a bit ‘gloomy’ since he was a child, and that feeds into his inspiration, another part of the sound is the inspiration which comes from old-school and European horror films and their soundtracks. The band have nodded to the influence of horror films before, but on Vertigo, Corpse admits to purposely planning to really pay homage to his musical influence with their track Love Zombi.
“I love horror films a lot, I love Italia horror films, especially their soundtracks, which in many cases for example for Dario Argento‘s movies, there’s this band called THE GOBLIN, which plays the background music and it’s strangely really different to American cinema. The sound works and it’s really kind of like there can be prog rock songs all of a sudden and really, really like eerie and ominous melodies,” Corpse enthuses. “I wanted to pay homage in the middle part of that song to that kind of music, and also the keyboard intro. I believe we sampled The Serpent and The Rainbow in the beginning of the song, which was also a bit of a nod off for horror films. It was more or less planned to have this connection to horror movie soundtracks. In the lyrics, it’s more Love Zombi, of course just a tale of possession of love, the carnal lust and so forth, you will give everything, you will give yourself in front of your true obsession and love, it’s about total surrender.”
JESS AND THE ANCIENT ONES go to show that sometimes looking backwards can help inspire our future. Vertigo is very much so the darker side to The Horse & Other Weird Tales, but how they have placed their sound to context together this time round sets an important example that there is darkness in the light. In the decades that inspired their sound and some of their contexts the most, there was terror amongst the peace symbols, and in how they put it across, they are bringing our own horrors to life. They may already have another albums worth of material, but for now, it’s worth basking in the fact that this band are not only getting stronger musically, but also with their artistic expression. Vertigo is merely the beginning for JESS AND THE ANCIENT ONES.
Vertigo is out now via Svart Records.
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