I can't help it. I'm Gen X, graduated from high school 1992 and attended, as a teen, the first Lollapalooza with headliners Jane's Addiction. I love their tribal, spacey, drugged-out, Dionysian sound.
The sound is complex, quiet and keening and yet elbowing for ever-more space via reverb and a percussive wall of sound, notably the hypnotic use of steel drums.
Perry Farrel —who I had the peak-experience honor of
interviewing a few years back for the Reno Gazette Journal—surfs the aural wave with ease and eccentricity.
"Jane Says," about a drug-addled girl with her feet on the most sordid of streets and her head in the clouds, is not just a song. Forgive my hyperbole, but to my music-addled brain, it's a prayer meeting of the church of rock 'n roll, set in the ancient Greek temple of the Oracle of Delphi.
—Sarah Torribio