JESTERS OF DESTINY – THE SORROWS THAT REFUSE TO DROWN

It was 30 years ago that Jesters of Destiny’s Fun at the Funeral debut was released on the short-lived Metal Blade subsidiary Dimension Records. A year later, they released the all-covers record In a Nostalgic Mood, after which the band was unceremoniously hacked from the Metal Blade stable and, unable to land another deal for their third album, No Laughing Matter, they quietly disappeared, with all the main participants going on to other pursuits. All these years later, Jesters of Destiny are back with The Sorrows That Refuse to Drown, an all-new record of the kind of hard rock/metal that only they made. “Having put out only one album and an EP before calling it quits in the late 1980s, the band’s sound was far too amorphous for its time, straddling too many disparate musical styles a full decade before genre-bending became fashionable in metal and hard rock. Their 1986 album has been reissued by the excellent Ektro Records, and listening to it today, you can hear how well it’s aged. Rooted in metal but never afraid to venture into punk, college rock, and psychedelia – you can totally hear the Flaming Lips in places – it’s a remarkably prescient record.” -Adrien Begrand, Decibel magazine. “During the promotional life of the album, Jesters of Destiny shared stages with Jane’s Addiction, the Dickies, Flaming Lips, L.A. Guns, Jetboy, the Fuzztones, and Thelonious Monster, demonstrating both how wide the Jesters’ style could venture, and how diverse the California scene was at the time. Nowadays, most histories boil Cali hard rock down to the emerging thrash scene growing out of Ruthie’s Inn in Berkeley and the hair metal coming out of the Hollywood clubs such as Gazzarri’s. (Of course, the Jesters played both.)” -Poncho, New Noise