THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: METHODRONE (1995)
1) Evergreen; 2) Wisdom; 3)
Crushed; 4) That Girl Suicide; 5) Wasted; 6) Everyone Says; 7) She Made Me; 8)
Hyperventilation; 9) Records; 10) I Love You; 11) End Of The Day; 12) Outback;
13) She's Gone; 14) Methodrone.
«Not to be confused with mephedrone or methedrone»,
the current edition of the Wikipedia article prudently warns us, and you'd
better heed that warning when you walk into any of the music stores that still
remain in your neighborhood unless you have nothing against accidentally getting
the heat on you. Actually, the album title is very smart — because formally,
all you can say is that it is a combination of "method" and
"drone", without any direct allusions to any heavy chemical
substances. And indeed, there's lots of droning here, and there most certainly
is a method: Anton Newcombe is one of those dangerous guys with conceptual
ideas in their heads who often force you to «respect» them even if you are
emotionally inclined to hate them and everything they stand for.
My major beef with Newcombe's ideology,
however, is not the way he conceives or plays his songs, but his insistence on
having us endure so many of them. Almost
all of these early BJM albums are insufferably long — of course, they were made
at the height of the CD era, when many people seriously thought that LPs now
should run up to 70 minutes by default just because their main physical medium
allows them to, but in Newcombe's case, I believe, we also have to deal with
additional egomania. (Oh, technically the songs are credited to the band as a
whole, and apparently Matt Hollywood, the bass player and occasional vocalist,
was also very much involved in the creative process, but not quite enough to offer
a distinct second identity.)
Methodrone, the BJM's proper official debut LP, is a
perfect illustration: 71 minutes of music that should have been pared down to
at most 40. Newcombe's formula is mostly the same for all these songs — slow,
repetitive, melodically minimalistic, trance-oriented guitar grooves — and this
makes the better realized ones get dissolved and camouflaged in the context of
the inferior material, so much so that even after three or four listens, I
still have memories of Methodrone as
a «collective substance», a species of musical earpaste, rather than a set of
songs where I could value the musical merits of each separate one. Which is not
necessarily bad, but I would probably prefer a 40-minute tube of earpaste than
this Jumbo package. Not being an elephant and all.
The departure from Spacegirl is felt here largely through improved production (as the
band was now affiliated with a real indie record label, Bomp! Records, and had
a couple of real producers working with them) and the lack of particularly
childish material like that "let me love you" bit from ʽSpacegirlʼ
itself. Other than that, the album is still answering the same question:
"What would have happened if Brian Jones had lived right into the era of
the Stone Roses and the early shoegazers?" Wait, scratch that. Not «Brian
Jones», really, who wasn't much of a composer or musical ideologue, but «Roky
Erickson» — if we have to choose one single figure that could be defined as the
grandaddy of the BJM sound circa 1995, that'd be The 13th Floor Elevators with
their garage-drone approach to exploding your subconscious. Take one listen to
the ten swirling minutes of ʽHyperventilationʼ and you will find all the
ingredients, with the notable exception of the electric jug, perhaps, but that
would make it just too obvious.
The best song here is probably still ʽCrushedʼ,
re-recorded in a much cleaner version and featuring an even more suicidal,
Robert Smith-influenced vocal from Newcombe. (ʽThat Girl Suicideʼ also makes a repeat appearance, but, despite
the title, it sounds much less suicidal than ʽCrushedʼ: the rotating-girating
Stonesy pop riff and the falsetto ooh-oohs give it the aura of a confused
psychedelic carnival). As for the new songs, they should probably be
categorized depending on whether they lean more to the funky Madchester side (not
often here, but ʽWisdomʼ is probably at least one such song) or to the «folk
drone» side (the majority of the tracks) or to the «random noise» side (like
ʽRecordsʼ, which just sounds like a lot of different tape shit slowed down and
played backwards). The «folk drones», in turn, can be spooky, or romantic, or
spooky and romantic — Anton Newcombe
is probably not a guy you'd want to go out with (at least, not without the
cover of an entire drug squad not further than fifty feet away) — but what ties
them all together is that each song is basically one idea, exposed to you right
away and luring you with the promise of a mighty crescendo that rarely, if
ever, comes to pass.
For instance, ʽI Love Youʼ is just about as
straightforward as its title — two chords, one vocal line, steady percussion,
light magical chimes, four minutes of monotonous serenading. Were this written
circa 1966, the basic sequence might have been used by any band as a brief
intro to a real song. Thirty years
later, we are being implicitly told that the key to real (or, at least, modern)
psychedelia is repetition, and that
two chords repeated for four minutes have a better chance of putting you into a
spiritual trance than five chords repeated for three minutes with a different
bridge section. That may be so, but then, of course, it depends very much on
which particular two chords you choose and how you present them.
And there you have BJM's main weakness: Newcombe
is not a melodic genius and he is not
a master-commander of all sorts of sounds. Despite all the pretense, the BJM
are just a guitar-bass-drums band, and although this rigorous approach gives
them a certain sort of integrity (no synthesizers!), the sound may quickly
become tedious. And the chances of its becoming tedious actually increase
faster than they should, because eventually the songs start becoming larger,
and ʽHyperventilationʼ with ʽShe's Goneʼ (10 and 7 minutes respectively) are
quite likely to try your patience. Think your life moves slowly enough to waste
10 minutes of it on one riff, against which some dickhead keeps informing you
that he's "sniffing glue" (as if anybody ever doubted that)? Have so
few problems that you can happily drift away to the little brass loop of ʽShe's
Goneʼ, losing yourself in the ether until the song abruptly ends with the man
telling you that "In my life, I've seen it all"? Take a dose of Methodrone and you get just what you
want.
Ultimately, I think it is still reasonable to
view Methodrone as sort of a «boot
camp» for the band, which would go on to undeniably higher heights — yet it is
already an excellent illustration of their synthetic strengths and modernistic
weaknesses, and you can draw upon it to both understand why certain underground
minorities hailed Newcombe as their hero, while others failed to notice him to
such an extent that the BJM did not even properly manage to become the torch-bearer
for Sixties' revivalism.
Agree that this is a kind of "boot camp" for the band, which would go on to record much better albums.
ReplyDeleteAlso interesting that while the band's name incorporates a Rolling Stone member, this album's cover is a version of "With the Beatles"/"Meet the Beatles" (four pretty-much-disembodied heads -- BJM's version is predictably much blurrier). 60s revivalism indeed.
"Rolling Stones member," I meant. And the more I look, the cover might also or alternatively be a version of the Stones' "Out Of Our Heads."
ReplyDeleteI was hoping you'd review the Brian Jonestown Massacre!
ReplyDelete