NECROMANCY

After a 6 year break, Mutiny in Jonestown returned with it's 23rd studio album, the aptly titled, "Necromancy". As with any entity recently returned from the dead, you have to expect they'll be a little shaky and such is the case with the start of this album. It opens with, "Breathe with Me", a song set to an ee cummings poem and the band definitely sounds like it just returned from a long vacation. It's not so much a great opening song as much as it is an announcement that it takes more than the events of the past 6 years to kill Mutiny in Jonestown! The band doesn't take too long to get back in the swing of things though jumping back in with "Think That I..."

While 2 of the pieces, "Doctor" and "Clonazepam" are both available on the compilation, "Anthology III (2003 - 2104)" (and their lyrics provide vague descriptions on why the band took a 6 year hiatus), there are plenty of other songs on the album worthy of a Mutiny in Jonestown album. The album is somewhat unusual in that there are as many songs with a clean rhythm guitar sound as there are with the distorted sound more often associated with the band. Also contained within the tracks are several lead synthesizer breaks and some especially inventive bass lines. Many songs, though shorter than most Mutiny in Jonestown epics, also move through many sections which yield some surprising and interesting contrasts.

I'd say that while this isn't the strongest overall Mutiny in Jonestown album, most songs are quite enjoyable. Also the album as a whole is important to the discography of the band as it marks the return after 6 years of inactivity, breaks the rust off the rails and sets the stage for the studio albums that follow, namely, "14", "Beatle Madness Volume I" and the band's 30 year anniversary (and my favorite album), "The Daemons Mock Me While I Sleep". For these reasons, I'm rating this one 3 stars.