The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Don't Get Lost

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: DON'T GET LOST (2017)

1) Open Minds Now Close; 2) Melody's Actual Echo Chamber; 3) Resist Much Obey Little; 4) Charmed I'm Sure; 5) Groove Is In The Heart; 6) One Slow Breath; 7) Throbbing Gristle; 8) Fact 67; 9) Dropping Bombs On The Sun; 10) UFO Paycheck; 11) Geldenes Herz Menz; 12) Acid 2 Me Is No Worse Than War; 13) Nothing New To Trash Like You; 14) Ich Bin Klang.

At this point, I am beginning to question myself whether or not this recent explosion of BJM albums might be due to Anton Newcombe misunderstanding the meaning of the classic Latin recommendation of Festina lente. Where most people would understand it sort of figuratively, as a call to focused and efficient action tempered by prudence and accuracy, Newcombe seems to take it more literally — as an appeal to release as many new records in the upcoming years as possible, containing as many slow-moving, hyper-draggy songs as possible.

At least the previous three albums were all short; Don't Get Lost clocks in at approximately 72 minutes — admittedly, not a record length for Newcombe, who used to be famous for slowly and meticulously bleeding out his grooves until the CD begged for mercy; but the last time he did that was in the era of the band's artistic «rebirth» with My Bloody Underground and Who Killed Sgt. Pepper, almost a decade ago. Since then, Newcombe experienced no new rebirths, largely returning to the original style of BJM, occasionally diversified by stylistic references to groove styles past 1967, and Don't Get Lost is no exception to the rule: the fourteen tracks captured here will give you no new insights whatsoever.

And me, too, I find myself at a loss once again. Clearly, the only way this sloth-like guy could churn out such a huge record about four months after his previous one was by quickly working out a few grooves and sticking to them — indeed, the opening track, ʽOpen Minds Now Closeʼ, rides on for eight minutes without a single deviation from its established formula. It's like a metronomic, unnerving groove by Can, but simplified to the core and with absolutely no room left for improvisation: elevator muzak for dark psychedelic types. Naturally, with this approach it is the easiest thing in the world to stretch a potentially 30-minute long record to 70 minutes. But then again, I reserve harsh judgement, because BJM always goes best with mushrooms (this is an objective fact, scientifically verified by the band's leader), and I'm not much of a mushroom man, so I cannot verify if the textures of Newcombe are truly a perfect psychological fit with chemi­cally altered brain activity or not.

In the sphere of ideology, Anton is still pretending that some of his songs should function as manifestos, hence such titles as ʽResist Much Obey Littleʼ (a bit paradoxical, since the steady, cyclical, descending-ascending acoustic rhythm pattern of the song is so mind-numbing that it only makes you want to resist little and obey much, at best) and ʽAcid 2 Me Is No Worse Than Warʼ, one of the album's few excursions into soft techno, drum machines, sampled vocals, and siren-themed synthesizers. ʽDropping Bombs On The Sunʼ is another title that might trigger poli­tical associations, and yet again, the track is a slow, totally stoned groove, ruled by minimalistic brass-imitating tones and lead vocals from Tess Parks, who still retains the status of Anton's muse by managing to sound twice as stoned as he does. («And far sexier», I wanted to add before rea­lizing that having sex with Tess Parks, judging from the perspective of her musical output, would probably only be efficient in an alternate universe where one minute of their time equals one hour of ours. «Slow down, you move too fast» is definitely not about these guys).

In his struggle to retain his cool, Newcombe does things that I hardly understand at all — for instance, calling one of the tracks ʽThrobbing Gristleʼ, even though Throbbing Gristle themselves would probably have regarded the entire brand of BJM production as a cheap profanation of the genuine avantgarde aesthetics (the track itself is just another monotonous psychedelic groove with Parks yawning and groaning all over the place). The next-to-last track, ʽNothing New To Trash Like Youʼ, is surprisingly faster than the rest — pretty much a generic rockabilly number buried under the generic layers of BJM production, and still somehow managing to sound as lethargic as everything else. One other track, ʽGeldenes Herz Menzʼ, sounds like modern lounge jazz put through the same motions — fussy jazzy drumming and tons of soft sax overdubs, hardly a subgenre where the man might make much of an impression.

Overall, just another year, just another album: nothing too bad, nothing too revelatory. And brace yourselves, because the guy is not about to stop — he's gonna crawl on and on and on, because the number of same-sounding draggy grooves with tons of wobbly overdubs that he can theoreti­cally produce is infinity.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Third World Pyramid

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: THIRD WORLD PYRAMID (2016)

1) Good Mourning; 2) Government Beard; 3) Don't Get Lost; 4) Assignment Song; 5) Oh Bother; 6) Third World Pyramid; 7) Like Describing Colors To A Blind Man On Acid; 8) Lunar Surf Graveyard; 9) The Sun Ship.

The fourth Brian Jonestown Massacre album in three years? What, is this 1966 all over again or is this merely the compensatory energy-outburst result of coming clean? I almost feel like advi­sing Anton Newcombe to slow down, if only that did not sound so comical when addressed to a man whose favorite musical tempo has always been «hallucinating adagio». At least he seems to be sticking to the short form: this new record is only a few minutes longer than Mini Album Thingy Wingy, so that both could probably fit on a single CD if necessary — but instead of melting down our brains with one huge close-to-eighty-minutes platter, the man has mercifully agreed on two small platters instead.

And I don't just mean a technical gesture — the compositions on Third World Pyramid are conceived and executed in the exact same vein as those on Mini Album, despite having been recorded at different sessions (and even with different guest stars). This here is just another batch of psychedelic drones, with exactly one musical idea per song, because, you know, having two ideas in one song is not such a prudent thing to do — I mean, what if they contradict each other? What if they start to fight? What if the second one makes you forget about the first — then the first one would be, like, wasted? What if the second one is not as good as the first? What if it spoils your concentration, or breaks the hypnotic spell? What if somebody says, "I like how they are so influenced by Sixties' bands, but you know, they have way too many key changes in their songs, that's no longer influence — that's slavish plagiarism!"

So have no fear, Third World Pyramid is not going to swamp you with a dazzling kaleidoscope of sounds and textures. Especially now that Anton seems to have found a new muse — a young Canadian psycho-artist called Tessa Parks, specializing in pretty much the same kind of music (dark, starry-eyed drones with stoned-enchanted vocals at the bottom); they ended up touring together for a while, and on this record she is handling some of the vocal duties. In between the two, they double their efforts at retrieving the atmosphere of soul-searching French movies from the 1950s/1960s, joining it with the essence of mind-opening music from London's UFO club, and presenting the results for 21st century audiences who are so desperate for something new that they will agree to revive anything old if it helps.

Unfortunately, the results suffer from the same problems as Mini Album. Newcombe, now a consummate professional in this business, gets a great sound going — the acoustic guitars, the Mellotrons, the woodwinds, the brass fanfares — but remains unable to push this anywhere be­yond simply having a «great sound». All the core melodies are based on the same blues-rock and folk-pop chord sequences that we have heard a million times, and it hurts particularly bad when the song length is extended for no reason — ʽAssignment Songʼ drags on for nine minutes, an interminable tribute to the likes of Donovan, survivable only if you get yourself in the mood soon enough. The second half, once the vocals have died down, is awfully mushy: no single instru­mental part stands out at the expense of others, and the result is a spineless psychedelic mess, equally polyphonous and cacophonous. (For comparison, remember the stylistically close an­themic coda to something like George Harrison's ʽIt's All Too Muchʼ — where all the multiple overdubs were clustered around a very tight melodic spine that chained you to the song's rhythm while at the same time blowing your mind with all the kaleidoscopic effects).

On some very rare occasions, like the title track, they increase the tempo, but it does not help much, because the bass remains barely audible, and the truly important functions are left to the humming electronics and the mystery ghost vocals. Slow or fast, the difference between these tracks and their spiritual predecessors always remains the same: Newcombe writes atmospheric mood pieces rather than songs, and that is his stated schtick that you can take or leave. As long as I have to listen to the record to give it a brief assessment, I can take it — but I am unsure why, ten years or even ten days from now, I would still want to prefer this secondary, derivative, mono­tonous material to a classic album by, say, The 13th Floor Elevators, where I can get moods and hooks and genuine original excitement. I mean, I might be on the same wavelength with New­combe — we both acknowledge the psychedelic Sixties as one of the greatest eras of music and a guiding light for one's musical tastes and hopes — but that does not imply agreeing on how we should be dealing with this musical legacy in 2016. 

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Mini Album Thingy Wingy

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: MINI ALBUM THINGY WINGY (2015)

1) Pish; 2) Prší Prší; 3) Get Some; 4) Dust; 5) Leave It Alone; 6) Mandrake Handshake; 7) Here Comes The Waiting For The Sun.

Yes, apparently this is the correct title of Newcombe's second artistic outburst of 2015 — not ʽPishʼ, as a fairly securely stoned Brian Jones seems to be telling you from his vantage position on the front sleeve. ʽPishʼ itself is only the name of the first track, which opens with a soaked-in-Sixties echoey blues-pop riff and quickly becomes a slow, monotonous, psychedelic vamp that takes you all the way back... no, not really into 1967, but rather into 1995-1996, back to New­combe's own roots. Pretty much all of the unpredictable, bizarrely mashed-up experimentation of the band's «second golden age» that began with My Bloody Underground has been thrown out of the window — so who knows what happened? My best guess is that Anton, once again, switched his drug of preference choice.

The results are not too bad, especially because of the wise choice to keep this restoration of tra­ditional Brian Jones family values short and sweet — 34 minutes is indeed a «mini-album», al­beit far from Newcombe's first attempt at brevity, and he does manage to drag us through some cool ideas and textures in the meantime. The problem is... all the old problems are back, too: each of the tracks exhausts its load of ideas in about one minute, and then it all depends on whether that one minute was enough to cast its trance over you or not. Take the longest piece for an example: ʽLeave It Aloneʼ quickly sets up a tough threatening mood, constructing a double-barrel musical machine out of one fuzzy, sustained chord and a dirty one-string vamp around it (think Jorma Kaukonen trying out Neil Young's style), and it's cool, but that's all it does for six minutes, and I cannot even say that the lead guitar kicks sufficient ass to endure this. (A real Neil Young pro­bably could, but a real Neil Young would probably refuse to play like he was stoned out of his mind, and with BJM this is almost always an obligatory condition).

On the slightly odder side of things, ʽPrší Pršíʼ does continue the recently established tradition of odd collaborations — this time, with Vladimir Nosal, allegedly the frontman of an indie band from Slovakia named Queer Jane (judging by what little I've heard from then on Youtube, they specialize in Beatlesque pop). Curiously, even though most of Queer Jane's material is sung in English, this track is sung in Slovak, because what can be more psychedelic than the usage of a Slavic language on an American retro-psychedelic album? However, if Slavic languages do not, by their very existence, already mystify and befuddle you, the track will hardly be more than just another pleasant, quickly forgettable psychedelic pastiche.

Elsewhere, you find a passable, but useless cover of a bona fide psychedelic classic (ʽDustʼ by the 13th Floor Elevators, with a lovingly recreated sound of that band's infamous electric jug); ano­ther slow, pleasant, predictable vamp that seems to be here just so that Anton can use a cool title like ʽMandrake Handshakeʼ; and, corniest of all, ʽHere Comes The Waiting For The Sunʼ, which, sounds absolutely nothing like either ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ or ʽWaiting For The Sunʼ, but rather, as some reviewers have already noted, like Donovan's ʽHurdy Gurdy Manʼ. Not that good old Donovan hasn't done his fair share of waiting for the sun back in the day, but enough with the pseudo-post-modern titles already, eh?

Anyway, no cri­ticism whatsoever about the sound of it all, Newcombe still understands the art of classic psyche­delic guitar (and throw in a bit of sitar and Mellotron where appropriate) better than anybody else in this world. It's just that he has once again given up on the idea to advance that art, and remains perfectly content just to fiddle around with it, in his usual «glorified lazy» mode. And putting your trusted mascot, for the first time ever, right up front on that album sleeve (did he even secure the rights for the photo?), is not going to mask the fact that Mini Album Thingy Wingy does seem like an attempt to wing it, and if so, then why does it even exist? We can al­ways pull off Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request off the shelf if we're in this kind of mood — there's no big need for a third one.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Musique De Film Imaginé

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: MUSIQUE DE FILM IMAGINE (2015)

1) Après Le Vin; 2) Philadelphie Story; 3) La Dispute; 4) L'Enfer; 5) Elle S'Echappe; 6) Le Cadeau; 7) Le Sacré Du Printemps; 8) Le Souvenir; 9) Les Trois Cloches; 10) Bonbon; 11) L'Ennui; 12) Bonbon Deux; 13) La Question; 14) Au Sommet.

One thing I have to say about Anton Newcombe: for a guy who largely built his reputation on a series of mind-numbingly repetitive psycho-drones, he sure comes up with the wildest of original ideas every once in a while. Forever and ever, he continues to be inspired with the Sixties — to him, probably representing the peak of the human spirit in the 20th century, or even beyond that (and he's not alone!) — yet he always manages to insert a bit of the 21st century in every tribute to that decade, with a maddening mix of slavish derivativeness and stunning originality.

This record, now, is also all about the Sixties (and a little Fifties), but suddenly he turns his attention away from the Beatles and the Stones and guides it over the English channel, to focus on French filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, for a change: since, apparently, the movies of Godard and Truffaut meant the same to film as the Beatles, Stones, and Velvets meant to music, it was only a matter of time before mad man Newcombe found a way to somehow incorporate that in his creativity. The only thing he forgot to make was a movie — but he did write the sound­track to it, and he claims to have actually seen the movie in his head, although I doubt that he'd ever be willing to commit it to camera, even if Warner Bros. approaches him with a million dollar deal. (And, let's face it, it would most likely be awful anyway).

Technically, much of the soundtrack sounds fairly traditionally for BJM: slow or, at best, mid-tempo instrumental grooves with lots of sustained notes formed into solemn guitar-based or brass-based melodies. However, most of the important tracks, written in minor keys, wrapped in serious echo, and often adorned by half-sung, quarter-spoken, and quarter-whispered vocals, have a much more romantic and doom-laden feel than Newcombe's previous work, bringing to mind both the recent French shoegazing scene (like Alcest) and, for sure, some of the sonic atmosphere of the old French New Wave — not so much Godard, though, whose movies were much too bizarre and turbulent for this, as somebody like Alain Resnais (Last Year At Marienbad could sure profit from some of these sounds) or even, goodness gracious, Claude Lelouche (some of the atmospheres are right up A Man And A Woman's alley).

To assist him in this uneasy, but intriguing task is a small selection of some authentic French and Italian modern talent — Stéphanie Sokolinski, better known as SoKo (since the combination of French and Slavic elements in that name is much too much for the average person to bear), musi­cal performer and actress with pop-Goth overtones, takes the lead vocal on ʽPhiladelphie Storyʼ (yes, that is the messed-up title, even if the original title of Cukor's movie in the French version was Indiscrétions); and Asia Argento, who also stars in movies and sings on LPs, although I am not sure if I have ever heard or seen anything from her (I know she's supposed to be in 1994's La Reine Margot, but that one was so terrible, I couldn't stand more than twenty minutes)... anyway, Asia Argento is featured on ʽLe Sacre Du Printempsʼ, which, as you have probably already gues­sed, has nothing whatsoever to do with Stravinsky. Is Stravinsky ever regarded as a forefather of The French New Wave? Not sure, but it's not really up to me to question Anton Newcombe's erudition — he obviously did some homework on this issue and I did not.

In any case, the important thing is that Musique seems to work even outside of all those con­nections — it is perfectly possible to enjoy it and even to be stimulated by it if you do not know a single thing about old French movies. Most of the grooves make sense. They can be quite mini­malistic, almost ambient (ʽBonbonʼ sounds like a digital projection of a meditative glass harmo­nica solo; ʽL'Ennuiʼ opens and closes with a simple musical box melody, over which a cello, a flute, and a Mellotron play a set of mournful chords), and they can be quite loud and bombastic (ʽL'Enferʼ, presenting a stern, but melancholic rather than terrifying picture of Hell — you know, the kind of Hell where demons keep asking themselves «to be or not to be?» before pouring boiling oil over your head), but they are all united by a sense of being stuck somewhere in limbo, as the old world has already been lost and the new one has not yet been gained — a sense that they do indeed share with some of those old movies.

The two sung tracks are no exception: «SoKo» sings with passion and energy on ʽPhiladelphie Storyʼ, but, true to her artistic persona, it is the passion and energy of a ghoul — "Hallelujah, chantez ma resurrection!" is the epic climax to each verse, upon which you dutifully expect a bite to the neck. And ʽLe Sacré Du Printempsʼ is kind of, like, you know, when they were all gathered to perform The Rite of Spring, but the weather turned out twenty degrees colder than expected, so they just all huddled up in their wintercoats and stayed home instead, staring out the windows and thinking real cold thoughts on the fate of the universe.

So, as you see, for me at least it does work, atmosphere-wise. This is the stiffest, most minimalis­tic and frozen Brian Jonestown Massacre release yet, more like a Dead Can Dance impersonating Brian Jonestown Massacre impersonating Alain Resnais with a little Antonioni DNA thrown in. It's not that good — the market has been flooded with half-ambient, winterish soundscapes like these for years anyway — but it feels solid and intriguing at least as yet another chapter in the odd journey of Anton Newcombe, which, considering his passion for chemical substances and his usual sloth-like approach to music, should have ended or, at least, transformed into a predictable straight line a long time ago. It does not, however, and for that reason alone I am happy to sup­port the record with a thumbs up and say that in a perfect world, it should have sold more copies than Adele's 25; but then again, in a perfect world like that 80% of the people would rather go watch a re-run of Last Year At Marienbad than the latest episode of Star Wars, and when you think about this real hard, the consequences can be rather scary.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Revelation

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: REVELATION (2014)

1) Vad Hände Med Dem?; 2) What You Isn't; 3) Unknown; 4) Memory Camp; 5) Days, Weeks And Moths; 6) Duck And Cover; 7) Food For Clouds; 8) Second Sighting; 9) Memorymix; 10) Fist Full Of Bees; 11) Nightbird; 12) Xi­balba; 13) Goodbye (Butterfly).

The problem with a «good formula for psychedelic music» is that, like most formulae, even this one begins to run dry after a while. Yes, the BJM did enter a new period of creativity and inspi­ration with My Bloody Underground, and managed to keep music evil for a little while — but with their fourth record from the same streak, they are beginning to repeat themselves... no, wait, scratch that, because repetition has always been a key element of the BJM ideology in the first place. They are beginning to sound like their own shadow — that would be more precise.

Again, Revelation is an album of repetitive psychedelic grooves, with each track usually harbor­ing one riff and one draggy vocal melody. These may be smart or dumb, emotional or bland, com­plex or simplistic, but what really sucks is that they are very close to each other in tone and spirit. Even Aufheben, calm and quiet as it was compared to Who Killed Sgt. Pepper?, seemed more diverse and less predictable than this collection of largely mid-tempo stomps with echoey bluesy riffs. I actually like some of these riffs, I really do: ʽFood For Cloudsʼ has an especially nice one, minor-melancholy-poppy in Robert Smith style, and the little bluesy flourish at the end of each verse in ʽMemory Campʼ is doggone nasty. But does it really all have to be so... even? The tracks just blend into each other, and with Newcombe's mumbly mutterings in the place of normal singing all the time, you just have no hope to carve out separate identities for the tracks. Song after song after song, it's just the same old drag.

The only attempts at something relatively different come in the guise of a few «rhythmically mo­dern» tunes, such as the funky ʽDuck & Coverʼ and the trancey-clubby ʽMemorymixʼ. They do not feel like obnoxious intruders, but their moods are the same — all these songs sound like the product of somebody for whom taking hard drugs is seen as an artistic obligation, rather than a source of pleasure or enlightenment. He doesn't want to, see, but he has to, or else he won't be able to churn out these tired, dusty, mentally uncomfortable grooves.

In the end, I just do not see the point. If I want an album of lean, mean, nasty, and unpredictably crazy BJM grooves, I will just try one more stab at Who Killed Sgt. Pepper?. If I want their de­construction of 1960s aesthetics, I will rewind the thread all the way back to 1996. Revelation, however, is just a typical going-through-the-motions effort: tasteful and cool-sounding as always, but adding nothing whatsoever to the band's legacy. Other than reminding us, perhaps, that as of 2014. Anton Newcombe is still alive and well. Relatively well, that is — I guess he's still sulking that nobody brought him Paul McCartney's head on Heather Mills' wooden peg, after all, and that may have taken a bite out of his stamina.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Aufheben

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: AUFHEBEN (2012)

1) Panic In Babylon; 2) Viholliseni Maalla; 3) Gaz Hilarant; 4) Illuminomi; 5) I Want To Hold Your Other Hand; 6) Face Down On The Moon; 7) The Clouds Are Lies; 8) Stairway To The Best Party In The Universe; 9) Seven Kinds Of Wonderful; 10) Waking Up To Hand Grenades; 11) Blue Order / New Monday.

According to Hegelian dialectics, Aufheben («picking up» or «canceling») is the process that takes place when a thesis is confronted with an anti-thesis — presumably followed by synthesis. This either invites a dialectical approach towards understanding this album by The Brian Jones­town Massacre, or it could mean that Anton Newcombe once took a German dictionary off the shelf, opened it on a random page, and let Fate decide to guide him through to a connection with Hegel — because, let's face it, Hegel was a fairly psychedelic guy, despite all the formal-logical trappings. And yes, you guessed it — Hegel could be just as boring as The Brian Jonestown Mas­sacre, and he could be just as proud of it, too.

If I think really, really hard, I could actually lead myself towards understanding Aufheben (the album) as a synthesis of sorts — it is, indeed, a cross between the dark groovery of the band's last two albums and their earlier, softer, limper homage to Sixties' psychedelia. A song like ʽI Want To Hold Your Other Handʼ, for instance, would be totally out of place on My Bloody Under­ground, and even though its association with the Beatles ends with its name (in the time that it takes Anton to get his point across, John Lennon would have had the time to hold your hand, hold your other hand, hold your legs, hold all the other parts of your body, and dump you for Yoko Ono), it does bring us back the old personality of Anton Newcombe, one that we'd almost forgot­ten with all that po-mo weirdness of killing Sgt. Pepper with Russian lyrics.

The album starts out with a couple dark, but not too bass-heavy grooves: ʽPanic In Babylonʼ is set to a cool, steady rock beat with Near Eastern woodwind overtones (a little reminiscent of old Hawkwind experiments in such mergers), and ʽViholliseni Maallaʼ has a Finnish title because the lead vocals are gallantly ceded over to Eliza Karmasalo, who must be Finnish (I suppose) and who lends the track a certain clichéd coldness, while in the background the band is entertaining us with chiming guitar leads, and occasionally a Robert Smith-style melancholic, echoey guitar line will break through the clearing as well and send you on a gloomy trip down memory lane. Both tracks sound fine, but... lightweight — like Air or some of those other atmospheric, psycho-adult-contemporary entertainers that understand beauty, but do not strive for the whole depth of it. But that's okay, we can take it. We have long since given up on the idea that Anton Newcombe could lead us into the promised land anyway.

From there on, we just keep drifting between these steady rock beat grooves and throwbacks to 1966 (sometimes very harsh throwbacks — ʽStairway To The Best Party In The Universeʼ, de­spite the title, steals its sitar riff from the Stones' ʽPaint It Blackʼ rather than from Led Zeppelin... ah crap, I'm getting really tired of jotting down all these combinations), but on the whole, the record does not shoot for the same kind of thoroughly unpredictable weirdness as its predecessor. There are some leisurely, «retro-progressive» (hey, nice word) flute-and-sitar instrumentals like ʽFace Down On The Moonʼ; some pastoral themes with swooping strings to disorient your brain (ʽThe Clouds Are Liesʼ); and some tracks that are seriously messed up with vocal overdubs (ʽSe­ven Kinds Of Wonderfulʼ, where they seem to be singing in French, but it is really hard to tell be­cause the polyphony is so overwhelming).

I like the way it all sounds — even if the weirdness and the heaviness have been toned down, the album only rarely reminds me of the irritating laziness of past BJM «masterpieces», and at least all of the grooves have their legitimate emotional interpretations, if you care enough to wait for them to come to you. But in the process, it kind of seems as if The Committee To Keep Music Evil once again started lagging behind on its primary purpose, and that the momentum gained by Newcombe with his «snarling» approach began to dissipate once more. All the same, I would like to extend a thumbs up to the album — certainly not because of its gimmicky aspects (which are negligible, anyway, compared to Who Killed Sgt. Pepper?), but... well, just because. I think I have the same type of reaction to late 1970s Hawkwind: pleasant, inoffensive, toe-tappy, mildly catchy, mildly mysterious stuff. Goes easy on the ears.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Who Killed Sgt. Pepper?

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: WHO KILLED SGT. PEPPER? (2010)

1) Tempo 116.7 (Reaching For Dangerous Levels Of Sobriety); 2) Þungur Hnífur; 3) Let's Go Fucking Mental; 4) White Music; 5) This Is The First Of Your Last Warnings; 6) This Is The One Thing We Did Not Want To Have Happen; 7) The One; 8) Someplace Else Unknown; 9) Detka! Detka! Detka!; 10) Super Fucked; 11) Our Time; 12) Feel It (Of Course We Fucking Do); 13) Felt Tipped-Pen Pictures Of UFOs.

Judging by the album cover, one might conclude that it was either Jesus who killed Sgt. Pepper, perhaps in retaliation for John Lennon's blasphemy, or, even more shockingly, that Jesus was Sgt. Pepper, in which case lines like "Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play" would take on a whole new light — in fact, the whole Sgt. Pepper would be actually a concept album about the life of Jesus, who'd love to turn you on with a little help from his friends (St. Peter, St. James, etc.), especially since it's getting better all the time, and she's leaving home to meet a man from the motor trade (shouldn't that be carpenter trade?), and ʽWhen I'm Sixty Fourʼ is, of course, about The Last Temptation Of Christ, and...

...sorry, well, at least that's one fine direction of thought that came from this BJM album without me hearing even one note of it. However, I am sad to say that this direction of thought has no­thing whatsoever to do with the album itself — which, incidentally, happens to be the weirdest offering from Newcombe in almost twenty years, and even if it rarely works on gut level (you'd have to have your guts made out of nylon for that), the very fact of its existence is somewhat of a consolation, since psychedelic musical surprises come so rarely these days.

We will proceed from the basic assumption that this album is total crap, which will make things easier for us. As usual, Newcombe dispenses his ideas with extreme frugality — hardly more than one per track — and, as usual, the album runs over seventy minutes. As usual, he appropriates and assimilates rather than invents. And he seems to have almost completely finalized the shift from «song-based» to «jam-based» music: the absolute majority of these tracks are just vamps, and if there are any words, they are repetitive mantras (as in, "let's go fuckin' mental, let's go fu­ckin' mental, la la la la, la la la la...") rather than verse-chorus constructions. And it probably took half an hour to figure out most of the album's melodic moves.

But the album lives, further expanding and polishing the new style of My Bloody Underground, now with twenty percent extra black venom as deep-cutting bass lines, metalic fuzz, and hard-whacking drum machines completely take over and turn the album into an endless journey through a series of harmless, but intimidating musical black holes. The band that once epitomized sonic narcolepsy has truly awoken — or, rather, entered a period of hyperactivity while still in a somnambulant state, like a narcoleptic on heavy amphetamines. And I find myself as puzzled as anybody, but much of the time it works.

The main part of the ride begins with the second track (the one with the Icelandic title), which is the closest Anton ever got to reproducing the classic Hawkwind vibe — a dark, brutal psycho-boogie with all sorts of astral effects, cymbal-heavy percussion, and an ugly nasal-vocal accom­paniment that we could all do without. ʽLet's Go Fucking Mentalʼ is designed as some sort of a trippy carousel ride around a dirty-sounding R'n'B guitar-and-harmonica groove with a nasty, not-give-a-damn attitude, rather than any intentions of having a good time, to it. ʽThis Is The First...ʼ has probably the best bass line on the album, emphasized with foamy-bubbly electronic effects and ridiculously pseudo-passionate Icelandic vocals, all the while chugging along at a relatively fast, very much danceable tempo — post-disco meets post-rock, or at least catches a brief envy­ing glimpse of it from a distance.

The real attraction of the record, though, is that it actually gets weirder and weirder as time goes by. ʽThis Is The One Thingʼ is a collage of two Joy Division songs (the "we were strangers" cho­rus from ʽI Remember Nothingʼ and the rhythm section of ʽShe's Lost Controlʼ), with additional lyrics and guitar grooves from Anton himself — the resulting atmosphere is nothing like the intimate bleakness of Joy Division, but it borrows nicely from that bleakness to add to the general «self-induced angry madness» of the album. Joy Division influence blips one more time later, on ʽSomeplace Else Unknownʼ (whose vocal melody and lyrics borrow from ʽInterzoneʼ), but the peak of the weirdness is reached on ʽDetka! Detka!ʼ (ʽBaby, Babyʼ) — an odd ska groove here with the entire song delivered in Russian, apparently by some guy from the completely unknown Russian band «Amazing Electronic Talking Cave». Absolutely no idea how they got in touch with Newcombe or why he thought that a little bit of Russian rock infusion would be a meaning­ful addition to his legacy, but there it is — for the record, the repetitive bridge section literally translates from Russian as "I will love you only after I die", which is a very Russian thing to mention in the context of a pop song, but few will ever know about that... and now you're one of those happy few who do know.

The final track here is neither a song nor even a groove — it is a simple ambient piece with just one soothing keyboard phrase, over which Newcombe first overdubs John Lennon's famous in­terview in which he apologizes for the "Beatles are bigger than Jesus" thing, and then some Bri­tish girl's lengthy, raving, and frantic denouncement of Lennon as a phony. This is, the way I gather, not so much a musical piece as another one of Newcombe's naughty keep-music-evil statements — as much as he clearly loves the Beatles (and who doesn't?), he finds it his duty to treat them as at least whippable, if not slayable, sacred cows, because, you know, otherwise he'll look like a fanboy rather than a respectable artist, and what will remain of The Brian Jonestown Massacre if they stop looking like respectable artists? Just monotonous grooves without a cause. The Committee To Keep Music Evil cannot allow that. Besides, if there is one single track on this album that can really drop you a clue as to who actually killed Sgt. Pepper, it is surely this one.

Despite some of these rather easily disclosed and predictable moves, on the whole I think that the album deserves its thumbs up — I mean, it nurtures and develops the curious direction of My Bloody Underground with extra care, so how could it be different? Maybe it is not half as «evil» as it positions itself to be, but that is still twice as «evil» as, say, your average cartoonish death metal album or whatever else passes for «evil» these days. Driven by a general unified purpose, monotonous in structure, but diverse and unpredictable in ideas, and, above all, kicking some ass in terms of sheer execution — that is at least something that should be encouraged, so let us be forgiving in details and encouraging on the general scale.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: My Bloody Underground

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: MY BLOODY UNDERGROUND (2008)

1) Bring Me The Head Of Paul McCartney On Heather Mill's Wooden Peg (Dropping Bombs On The White House); 2) Infinite Wisdom Tooth / My Last Night In Bed With You; 3) Who's Fucking Pissed In My Well?; 4) We Are The Niggers Of The World; 5) Who Cares Why; 6) Yeah Yeah; 7) Golden Frost; 8) Just Like Kicking Jesus; 9) Ljósmyndir; 10) Auto-Matic-Faggot For The People; 11) Dark-Wave-Driver / Big Drill Car; 12) Monkey Powder; 13) Black Hole Symphony.

Finally, a significant detour — it took almost five years to complete it, but this is probably the most major stylistic shift for Newcombe ever since he'd abandoned shoegaze and contemporary dance rhythms in favor of recreating the hypothetical mindset of post-pool era Brian Jones. The album title itself is indicative of the change: My Bloody Valentine were a larger influence on the BJM circa Methodrone rather than in the past decade, and The Velvet Underground were always a huge influence, but more formally than substantially — «drone» being a major link and all, yet up to now Newcombe had largely bypassed the Velvets' penchant for reckless, abrazive experi­mentation, «ugliness», and «nastiness».

Time for rethinking that abstinence. For years now, Newcombe has had his own record label, titled The Committee To Keep Music Evil, and yet neither of his previous two albums seemed like they were perfectly in touch with that name. Now, armed with some particularly hard drugs and additional stipulations (like no talking whatsoever in the studio), Newcombe seems bent on finally bringing his music in line with that name — or at least, the song titles, the first one of which alone could have earned him a wanted poster from millions of Beatle fans, had he at least a one thousandth share of recognition of Heather Mills' husband. Not that the song title has any­thing to do with the song's lyrics or the song's music — it's just a gratuitous swipe, you know, to keep the music evil.

Of course, the basic BJM principles have not really changed. The main modus operandi remains as simple as it used to be: one midtempo musical idea per song, looped and whipped mercilessly unto self-extinction. But now the focus is on making these ideas nasty and funky, rather than limp and somnambulant. Suddenly the junkie flips a switch, and his vibes are no longer wasted and dis­sipated somewhere in outer space, but sharpened, poisoned, and directed right at you. This still does not excuse the album's awful length (almost 80 minutes in total), but somehow it makes it easier to sit through it without swallowing your tongue or locking your eyelids than through quite a few of BJM's much shorter records.

The «meat» of the album lies in its dark, distorted, grumbly, repetitive epics: ʽWho Cares Whyʼ, ʽAuto-Matic-Faggot For The Peopleʼ (oh, that title), ʽDark Wave Driverʼ, and especially ʽMon­key Powderʼ with its particularly eerie rising-and-falling bass groove. If you think they sound like a cross between classic Hawkwind and classic Sonic Youth, you are most likely right: and unlike either of these bands, Newcombe is perfectly willing to disallow even minor bits of variation as the groove grooves along, what with his well-known aversion to «musical development» within any given musical track. Yet somehow, this «dark ambience» seems more tolerable and even more sensible than the «limp ambience» of past albums — maybe because of the relative fresh­ness of the approach, or maybe because the deep bass riffs of the grooves make deeper impres­sions and make you feel like you're walking along a treacherous, creepy, but vaguely exciting path, rather than just making your way through an endless irritating field of hemp.

Naturally, even this does not last forever: the album has its fair share of obvious missteps, such as the solo piano piece ʽWe Are The Niggers Of The Worldʼ, whose fairly strong title should at least suggest depths of sorrow or heights of anger — instead, it sounds like somebody trying to ape one of Keith Jarrett's improvisation styles (and not doing a complete suckjob, actually, but some­thing tells me this piece was far from improvised, which makes all the difference). And while the concluding piece, ʽBlack Hole Symphonyʼ, shows that Newcombe has progressed far enough in his mastery of electronics to be able to produce at least one awesome sonic loop that does remind you of black holes, looping it for ten minutes really means that he is aware that you can shut it off any second. And the funniest thing is, regardless of the outcome, Newcombe wins — if you shut it off prematurely, he has manipulated you into getting angry, and if you do not, he has manipu­lated you into getting stupid.

But I am still closing my eyes on this and giving the album a thumbs up, if only for one of the most genuinely weird tracks produced in the decade — by accident, no doubt, yet even so ʽLjós­myndirʼ (ʽPhotographsʼ in Icelandic) is as simple as it is baffling: a minimalistic soundscape of cold ambient synthesizers, over which are scattered echoey pieces of Icelandic babble. It does look silly on paper, yet for some reason I find it strangely more enchanting than your average BJM limp-groove, and if it is some sort of Newcombe-tribute to the magic island that gave us Björk, Sigur Rós, and Eyjafjallajökull, the man has captured its essence in one stroke. Which only makes it so much more frustrating to realize how much of that natural talent he has wasted over intellectual conceptualization and, let us be frank, conceptual castration of his ideas. Yes, the man got talent to burn — but then most of it gets burned over drugs or over intentional creative lazi­ness that gets presented as the next step in artistic vision. Go figure.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: ...And This Is Our Music

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: ...AND THIS IS OUR MUSIC (2003)

1) The Wrong Way; 2) Introesque; 3) Starcleaner; 4) Here To Go; 5) When Jokers Attack; 6) Prozac Vs. Heroin; 7) Geezers; 8) Maryanne; 9) You Look Great When I'm Fucked Up; 10) Here It Comes; 11) What Did You Say?; 12) Prozac Vs. Herion Revisited; 13) A New Low In Getting High; 14) Some Things Go Without Saying; 15) Tschusse; 16) The Pregnancy Test; 17) The Right Way.

I almost feel sorry for this, you know, but the further on we advance along the Newcombe trail, the more it starts to resemble some lonely Arizona highway where a solitary cactus causes as much excitement as Khufu's Pyramid. No, it is not true that all of his albums sound alike. This one, for instance, sees the (re-)introduction of electronic instruments that make it seem more like a traditional/modern hybrid than any of the preceding three or four records. But to what end, if the basic approach to music making remains completely the same?

Probably the most innovative and amusing touch here are the intro and outro — ʽThe Wrong Wayʼ captures one of Anton's girlfriends on the answering machine, furiously complaining about how much of an asshole he has been, and ʽThe Right Wayʼ finishes off the album with another of his lady friends (Sarah Jane from The Out Crowd) with a far more friendly message. Even those tracks, however, were apparently used by Anton without explicit permission from either of the girls (so the «asshole» component actually finds confirmation), and had to be deleted from some of the later digital versions of the album — and even if they are left in, this is as much a sign of artistic invention as it is of pointless egotism.

When it comes to the music, though, nothing helps. You would think that at least a song titled as magnificently as ʽProzac Vs. Heroinʼ could turn out to be a musical masterpiece — instead, it is just another two-chord acoustic drone lazily adorned with minimal electric guitar solos and wispy strings, as Newcombe sings in his usual «I'm-too-stoned-to-order-my-brain-to-switch-to-a-diffe­rent-note» fashion. You come here expecting some sort of musical battle, between the dark (hero­in?) and the light (prozac?) or something, and all you find is this numb droning. Pleasant enough and tastefully produced as usual, but about as exciting as your average anesthetic. And then, once it's over, you get ʽGeezersʼ which is basically five minutes more of the same.

Electronics do not help. On ʽStarcleanerʼ, you have digital keyboards and drum machines, but it is still just two and a half minutes of sleepy droning. «Astral noises» on ʽYou Look Great When You're Fucked Upʼ cannot mask the fact that it is basically just the same mind-numbing acoustic guitar pattern over and over again, and the noises themselves are as lazy in coming as the rhythm track — ʽInterstellar Overdriveʼ would come across as Slayer in terms of madness and energy when compared to this yawnfest.

The only way to somehow enjoy this record is to completely clean your head from any possible associations — just forget that music existed prior to 2003, period. Woe is me! I cannot do that, and am forever doomed to this one reaction when I hear the beginning of ʽA New Low In Getting Highʼ: «Put Neil Young in the studio, tie a 50-pound weight to each of his limbs, inject him with a pound of laxatives, make him play ʽLove And Only Loveʼ, and this is what you get». Or to this one when I force myself to become sensitive to the Grand Tragic Finale of ʽTschusseʼ: «Put Ro­bert Smith in the studio, tie a 50-pound weight to...», okay, sorry for repeating myself, but so does this guy, and at least he gets paid for this. Well, occasionally, at least.

Because of all these associations, my mind may be clouded, but this time, there is not a single song here for which my brain would voluntarily agree to allocate even a single memory cell, other than within a negative force field (as in, ʽHere It Comesʼ brings on sweet memories of Neil Young's ʽOh Lonesome Meʼ, so hey, a nice pretext to go put on After The Gold Rush one more time). Is that a sign of stubborn close-mindedness? At this moment, I don't really think I care any more — so, with a sigh of relief, as Sarah Jane says her sweet goodbyes to Anton for the third time, we leave them with a thumbs down in their hazy padded cell. And God knows I'm a big fan of padded cells in general — they're great when you can let your imagination run wild and just use the walls as a canvas. But when you're just sitting there looking at your own spit slowly dribbling from the wall down to the floor... well, not quite so exciting, I'd say.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Bravery, Repetition And Noise

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: BRAVERY, REPETITION AND NOISE (2001)

1) Just For Today; 2) Telegram; 3) Stolen; 4) Open Heart Surgery; 5) Nevertheless; 6) Sailor; 7) You Have Been Disconnected; 8) Leave Nothing For Sancho; 9) Let Me Stand Next To Your Flower; 10) If I Love You?; 11) (I Love You) Always; 12) If I Love You? (New European Gold Standard Secret Babylonian Brotherhood Cinema Mix).

Repetition — by all means. Noise — not all that much, compared to what commonly passes for «noise» in 2001. Bravery — well, I would guess that if Anton Newcombe were capable of writing better songs than these, then preferring to release this album instead would require some bravery. As it is, I don't see much bravery here. Certainly dismissing long-time partner Matt Hollywood from the band after some onstage argument does not count as «bravery». Maybe the stubborn way of sticking to the same dronified formula counts as «bravery», from some point of view. But is there any other formula to which Newcombe could switch over without saying good­bye to Brian Jonestown? Did he even have a choice at that point?..

The album feels like a rather natural follow-up to Strung Out In Heaven, largely avoiding lengthy spaced-out jams in favor of shorter pop tunes — and, as already predicted by the model, they are typically slow, folksy, dependent on monotonously strummed chords, and go easier than easy on the hooks. The mood is almost completely fixed in place: no fast rockers, no psychedelic freak­outs, just one slow, drowsy, dark-folk shuffle after another. The three chords that open the album (ʽJust For Todayʼ) perfectly capture the bleakness and somberness of everything that follows, but the song itself never goes anywhere once its main rhythm line is established, and that droning pattern on its own offers little redemption — and not only is Newcombe's singing mumbled as usual, but it is also awfully mixed-in this time, as if he were trying to correlate his troubled state of mind with the shittiest possible way his troubled voice could reach your troubled ears out of the troubled speakers. In short, we're in trouble.

I like the song ʽYou Have Been Disconnectedʼ. Once the obligatory jangly pattern has set in, the band adds a nice, memorable organ riff to it — nothing too phenomenal, but just the right touch on the way of transforming the proceedings into solid pop music, where even Newcombe's ghostly singing seems well aligned with the phantasmagoric organ tone. The organ on ʽOpen Heart Sur­geryʼ, another relative success, also sharpens and enhances the mood, and the song itself is largely free from droning, being totally focused on that organ and a gloomy bass riff. It is one of the few times, also, that Anton tries to overclock himself, which led to some reviewers happily comparing the track's style to The Cure — the big difference, of course, being that Robert Smith would probably have somebody's head on a platter for that sort of arrangement and sloppy production, and he would just keep on layering instrument after instrument so that the depth of the tragedy would be increased every several bars. But Newcombe — you know that guy, he says it all right from the start: «building up» is for pussies.

There is one cover here, of a predictably obscure oldie (ʽSailorʼ by The Cryan' Shames), a good song in its own right but completely lost in this general context — leave it to Anton to transform potential gorgeousness into stoned-out-of-your-mind monotonousness. ʽLet Me Stand Next To Your Flowerʼ may be a pun on the Hendrix line, but the song has nothing to do with Jimi — it is just another monotonous, martial-style pop tune that fundamentally sounds like the Beatles' ʽGood Day Sun­shineʼ with all the joy (and sunshine) surgically removed and replaced with drugged-out numbness. Same goes for ʽIf I Love You?ʼ in both its versions (a stripped-down acoustic rendi­tion) and then a much lengthier, «epic» rendition at the end of the album — a song delivered in such a frozen tone, at such a somnambulant pace, that the answer to the rhetorical question cannot be anything other than "please define love first, and we'll talk later".

Not that any of these tunes are artistically insincere: as usual, they seem to reflect Newcombe's proper state of mind at the time really well. The problem is that we have already known that state of mind for quite some years now, and it is hardly the most fascinating or stimulating state of mind in the world. Nor does it make much sense to woo us over by focusing on the dark shades of Jim Jarmusch (yes, that is him) on the front cover — just the mere fact that (one of) the world's trendiest arthouse directors thus endorses the creativity of the BJM should only make matters worse: in reality, the BJM rise above the usual «hipster boy» level, and hardly need to emphasize their coolness in such additional ways. (Jarmusch did use one of their songs in the soundtrack to Broken Flowers, but was there any real need to «return the favor»?).

On the whole, the record is like a compromise between the «trance» and the «retro pop» aspects of the band — pop music with detached pop hooks, converted into «trance» by the somewhat dehu­manized spirit of its creator. Since it achieves its goals, has a few nice songs, and features the usual classy retro sound that we always expect from Anton and his team, it would be impolite to give it a thumbs down. But will I ever listen to it again? Meaningless question — in Newcombe's world, time stands perfectly still, and there is no such thing as «again», I guess.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Strung Out In Heaven

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: STRUNG OUT IN HEAVEN (1998)

1) Going To Hell; 2) Let's Pretend That It's Summer; 3) Wasting Away; 4) Jennifer; 5) Got My Eye On You; 6) Nothing To Lose; 7) Love; 8) Maybe Tomorrow; 9) Spun; 10) I've Been Waiting; 11) Dawn; 12) Lantern; 13) Wis­dom.

This was the band's only release on a «major minor label», as they temporarily switched from Bomp! Records to the larger TVT Records, whose biggest claim to fame up till then were the Nine Inch Nails — hardly the closest band to BJM in terms of style and attitude, but somehow the TVT people thought Newcombe and his pals had a bright commercial future before them, and signed them to a multi-record deal. The deal lasted for just one album — this one — and when it flunked, the band got dropped again, with an ever lessening chance to be one day picked up by Warner Bros. or Sony Music Entertainment.

Since Newcombe's dependency on heroin by this time was said to be near-complete, allegedly much of the work fell on the shoulders of Matt Hollywood, and this may be the reason why the record is slightly shorter than usual, and more dynamic — and also even more retro — than usual: although the tempos are still slow rather than fast, there are very few mind-numbing drones, and for the most part the band here just concentrates on a modest, unpretentious pop-rock and folk-rock sound, so that the absolute majority of the songs here sound like inferior imitations of mid-Sixties masterpieces. Okay, so there's nothing essentially new in this statement — it just needs to be stressed that this is the first BJM album that does not even begin to try to build upon the legacy of the elders; instead, it merely imitates that legacy.

Probably the most blatant imitation for those in the know will come with the second song, ʽLet's Pretend That It's Summerʼ, whose ominously melancholic beginning is transparently reminiscent of The Kinks, particularly ʽDead End Streetʼ and similar songs. Ah, but if only Newcombe and Hollywood were really endowed with the genius of a Ray Davies! As it happens, the ominous­ness of the verses is completely wasted on the limp, disappointing chorus — the "let's laugh, have fun..." part, suddenly changing tempo and tonality and borrowing its bassline from the Beatles' ʽRevolution 1ʼ (yes indeed!), dissipates, rather than explodes, the tension build-up of the verse, and, in my opinion, is a first-rate example of how not to write a pop song if you truly want to hook your listener. And since these examples could be easily multiplied, it is no wonder that even a larger label was unable to properly promote the BJM — the Sixties' stylistics might have been «classy» all right, but class without catchiness is a poor contributor to album sales.

ʽWasting Awayʼ is another strange creation, with generational lyrics that seem to have been in­ten­tionally written from a Sixties' perspective: "The kids today / They got nothing to say / Be­cause they taught them that way" — and the accompanying sad harmonica solo brings Neil Young to mind (was there ever a Neil Young reference in a BJM review prior to this? If no, we're making progress). Nice sound, right message, but is this an interesting song? The harmonica solo is probably the best part about it. The rest — well, the song is just too limp and lazy to properly match the aggressive accusations of the lyrics. If I were an angry young man and I heard Anton Newcombe telling me that I'm wasting my life away in this sort of relaxed, nonchalant fashion, I would probably just tell him to go fuck himself — and it just ain't clear who of us exactly would be wasting his life away, anyway.

Or a love song like ʽJenniferʼ — there's, like, one jangly guitar line holding the entire song to­gether, and normally you expect a line like this to serve as a building block for something bigger, but this is just nonsense: it's like coming to a fancy restaurant, getting a nice bread basket for starters and then, much to your surprise, finding out that you are going to get nothing other than nice bread baskets until the end of the day. Come on, guys! Do something! Add an extra frickin' chord, for Chrissake! This is a tribute to Sixties pop — not even Gerry and The Pacemakers would tolerate such arrogantly lazy songwriting!

To cut a long story short, or, rather, to excuse myself for being unable to come up with a long story, Strung Out In Heaven has a very pleasant sound that will be doubly pleasant to all those who like old school folk rock, but do not like monotonous psychedelia. It even has a few oldies re-recorded here to match their then-current understanding of an ideal sound (ʽWisdomʼ from Methodrone, which most people must have forgotten completely by 1998). There is not a single bad song — but there is not one single song here I'd ever love to hear again, either, because the melodies are derivative, the hooks are not well developed, and the production, devoid of BJM's usual layers of multi-everything, is boring. Not coincidentally, almost every other review of this record I've seen usually avoids, intentionally or not, talking about the individual songs — be­cause, well, there's just nothing to say. Good acoustic guitar tones. Not so good singing. Whatever.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Give It Back!

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: GIVE IT BACK! (1997)

1) Super-Sonic; 2) This Is Why You Love Me; 3) Satellite; 4) Malela; 5) Salaam; 6) Whoever You Are; 7) Sue; 8) (You Better Love Me) Before I Am Gone; 9) Not If You Were The Last Dandy On Earth; 10) #1 Hit Jam; 11) Servo; 12) The Devil May Care (Mom & Dad Don't); 13) Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request.

It's too bad there are but 365 days in a year, because Give It Back! sounds so very much like those preceding three albums, it might just as well have been written and recorded by Newcombe in a matter of just a few more days, and then The Brian Jonestown Massacre would have four re­cords released within one year and set a personal high that even Frank Zappa would find rather hard to beat. There are some new band members here, including guitarist Peter Hayes who stayed with the band but briefly and then went on to form the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, but let that not bother you, because Newcombe is the Ian Anderson of this band and he ain't never letting its identity slip away or be usurped by an intruder, no matter how many different brands of hard drugs he is on at any given particular moment.

Some fans actually regard this as a special high point in BJM history, swearing by Give It Back! as a masterpiece or the culmination of everything that made this band so great — a sentiment I find hard to share, because the word «culmination» indicates some sort of growth or at least some sort of «still haven't found (var.: finally have found) what I'm looking for» idea, whereas New­combe's Sixties-fueled, drug-powered brain does not really function all that much in «search» mode — it simply has its own steady rate of predetermined metabolism. I could not even begin to describe in general what separates Give It Back! from the 1996 albums — so let us just talk a bit about the individual songs instead.

ʽSuper-Sonicʼ has a cool groove going on, with a bluesy bassline, funky percussion, Indian sitars, and noisy shoegaze-style lead guitars in the background — a freaky, typically BJM combination of ingredients, over which Anton pours out his usual vegetative-state mumbly philosophizing about living alone and how it's alright for him and not alright for her. As predictable as the song's strengths are, its flaws are equally easy to guess — it is a bit hard to sit through a five-minute song where everything that could have happened did so over the introduction and the first few bars of the main theme. But this complaint, as usual, applies to everything here that runs over three minutes and irritates people whose attention span for this kind of music qualifies as «short» (like myself, who'd rather waste my time on something a little more energetic and dynamic than the BJM — like Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon).

Most of the other songs, if they are good, display this goodness in the same way: one nice melody looped in static mode. If they are not very good... they have one boring melody looped in static mode, like ʽSatelliteʼ, which simply takes the old ʽGreen Onionsʼ theme, modifies it very slightly, piles up additional acoustic and electric guitars, but does not care about making it snappy and aggressive — the whole thing limps, and if you're gonna limp all the way, at least do it in a more moody fashion. ʽSueʼ, the longest track on the album, is much better, especially in headphones where you have one folk-style lead guitar part serenading in your left ear and one heavy wah-wah blues-rock part blaring away in your right ear, but both mixed in at low volumes so as not to drown out the basic rhythm track — or else, God forbid, you might want to play air guitar or something instead of just bobbing your head up and down and sideways at the trance-inducing sound waves. But yeah, that wah-wah solo is actually quite frantic when you focus on it.

Of special note might be the brief jangle-rock tune ʽThis Is Why You Love Meʼ, which cannot really be anything other than a loving tribute to Gene Clark's ʽI'll Feel A Whole Lot Betterʼ — the difference being that, for some reason, the BJM track is neither played, nor sung, nor produced as nice-and-tight as any of the early Byrds material (go figure). And on the fast-paced ʽMalelaʼ, they try to play the sitar as if it were a banjo (well, sitars and banjos do have similar timbres, don't they?), even borrowing a few note sequences from ʽPaint It Blackʼ, but the end result is mildly funny rather than depressing.

The song ʽNot If You Were The Last Dandy On Earthʼ caused some controversy — formally, it was an obvious answer to The Dandy Warhols' ʽNot If You Were The Last Junkie On Earthʼ: apparently, the Warhols' song was a friendly reprimand of the BJM for sticking to drugs in an age when drugs are already so passé, to which Newcombe replies with a reprimand of the Warhols for sticking to «dandyism» when dandyism is already so passé, well, you know the rest. At least it helps Anton get a little angry and play some pissed-off distorted leads on a true garage rocker, although I would not describe it as a particularly good song — they just thought it necessary to hit back (not very successfully, because the Warhols' track was a commercial hit on the UK charts, whereas the BJM never charted at all).

The album also continues the age-honored tradition of putting your album title in one place and your song title in another — the lead-out track is ʽTheir Satanic Majesties' Second Requestʼ, a rather boring sonic collage whose only distinctive point is the sound of heavy snoring, looped all over the track and possibly sampled from the Stones' ʽIn Another Landʼ, or, at least, paying tri­bute to that song and Bill Wyman's massive lung activity. Not that the song title has anything to do with the collage, or Newcombe has anything to do with Bill Wyman, or anything has got to do with anything — all of this is on a simple take-it-or-leave-it level. I take some of it, but, as usual, I'd rather distill this album down to about 15 minutes of music rather than accept it as 55.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Thank God For Mental Illness

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: THANK GOD FOR MENTAL ILLNESS (1996)

1) Spanish Bee; 2) It Girl; 3) 13; 4) Ballad Of Jim Jones; 5) Those Memories; 6) Stars; 7) Free And Easy, Take 2; 8) Down; 9) Cause I Love Her; 10) Too Crazy To Care; 11) Talk - Action = Shit; 12) True Love; 13) Sound Of Con­fusion.

Okay, this one is actually more like a friendly post-scriptum to the two biggies from the same year. The first twelve tracks are mostly acoustic or acoustic-based, feature an absolute minimum of songwriting, and rarely go over three minutes — truly a record that could have been planned, written, recorded and released by someone like Anton in a matter of three days. The last track, included, I believe, mainly in accordance with the «leave no space unfilled» strategy, is a lengthy collage that features several minutes of street noises (cars, more cars, and still more cars), and then a bunch of lo-fi recordings that mostly constitute alternate versions of old songs from Space­girl and Methodrone. So yeah, just like that.

Actually, the first half is rather nice. At least it moves around at a larger variety of tempos than Second Request, and the short song lengths are also quite welcome. There are no highlights or lowlights — the point is largely to imitate various shades of acoustic pop and folk-rock circa 1965-66 which, at different times, will remind you of the Beatles in their Rubber Soul period, the Stones in their Aftermath period, the Kinks in their Face To Face period, the Easy­beats in their ʽFriday On My Mindʼ period, Dylan in either his Another Side or his Blonde On Blonde period, and of... uh... ʽYou Are My Sunshineʼ as sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary (ʽThose Memo­riesʼ). The only catch is that these are all Newcombe songs, and he predictably injects them with large dosages of his own bleak, romance-without-answer personality.

Arguably the least predictable track is the first one, ʽSpanish Beeʼ, where, to the sound of Spanish guitars and castanets, over which additional guitars drone in morose tones, Newcombe states that "This hopeless century, I've lived all alone" and that "I could have died, because of your greed". Whose greed is not exactly clear — but what is clear is that the dark Spanish style agrees with the BJM just as well as dark Anglo-Saxon folk or Afro-American blues motives. Another thing that certainly separates these acoustic tunes from all their influences is the endless pessimism and skepticism which they are soaked in — even within these thirty minutes, there is a general feel of total hopelessness that, in the Sixties, you couldn't even get from such kings of «mope rock» as The Doors (who played it on a grand theatrical level rather than on the «ordinary routine» level of Newcombe). Besides, even the Doors had some simple love songs — with Newcombe, the idea of a simple love song is always accompanied with the presupposition of «want her, need her, can never get her, not in a million years». In a philosophical sense, too — where «getting her» means much more than just a sexual liaison, and is essentially impossible in a Kantian sense.

One thing that seriously bugs me, though, is that once again it all smells of a self-conscious ap­proach. The LP title — Thank God For Mental Illness — seems awfully clever and uncomfor­tably true (considering how closely for comfort great art is often tied in with mental illness), but we do not regularly see actual madmen in art psychoanalyzing themselves (I mean, the above­mentioned Jim Morrison was definitely deranged, but could you see The Doors naming one of their albums this way?). This casts a shadow of self-absorption and maybe even unwarranted nar­cissism on the songs — like, who really is this Newcombe guy to appropriate songwriting and emotion-wrenching techniques from all these giants of the Sixties for his own egotistical pur­poses? Rewriting the classics is, after all, an act of arrogance, and if the arrogance is unjustified, the ship goes down fairly quickly. Oh, okay, at least the guy actually does drugs, so that's some sort of consolation-justification, I guess. He's legit... not really, no.

But if you don't take it too seriously, the record offers some quirky fun that is at least much easier to sit through than the endless slow drones of Second Request. I find it hard (if not useless) to discuss the individual songs — unless in terms of how they rearrange, reroute, and rewire the classics — but I found it easy fun listening to them, and in the light of this, I can disregard the awful (as usual) album cover and give the record a very lightweight thumbs up. And you can just detach and destroy the ʽSound Of Confusionʼ part — it works much better as just a thirty minute long album.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES' SECOND REQUEST (1996)

1) All Around You (intro); 2) Cold To The Touch; 3) Donovan Said; 4) In India You; 5) No Come Down; 6) (Around You) Everywhere; 7) Jesus; 8) Before You; 9) Miss June '75; 10) Anemone; 11) Baby (Prepraise); 12) Fee­lers; 13) Bad Baby; 14) Cause, I Lover; 15) (Baby) Love Of My Life; 16) Slowdown (Fuck Tomorrow)/Here It Comes; 17) All Around You (outro).

Well, they asked for it. It always takes a concentrated effort to discuss BJM music on its own merits, without necessarily looking back on Newcombe's idols and dragging in the comparative aspect — but with an album title like this, ignoring the comparative aspect is like ignoring a pub­lic slap in the face. Clearly, this is a legacy claim. I actually know a few people whose favorite Stones album is Their Satanic Majesties' Request, just because they find the combination of the band's usual sneery/rebellious arrogance with cosmic/psychedelic ambience so decidedly one-of-a-kind, and it seems that Newcombe is one of these people — he likes his transcendental inspi­ration to come along with some snap, or vice versa. And here we are being told that it is this par­ticular vibe that he wants to cherish and develop. Well, I guess we already knew that before, but we weren't told about it so explicitly.

The problem is, I am neither at all sure that that particular vibe could be developed further, nor that Anton Newcombe, Matt Hollywood, and their temporary partners are the perfect team to try out this development. That the album, once again, is insanely long is only part of the problem — after all, if it works, it works, and if it succeeds in unlocking your cosmic conscience, it no longer matters how long it is because «time» as a concept becomes relative and all that. A much bigger part of the problem is that this particular mojo doesn't seem to work on me, and if I succeed in explaining why, it might become obvious that it also wouldn't work on many other people.

First and foremost, the record only remotely sounds like Satanic, and its differences are usually of the negative kind. It is rich in instrumentation, yes, with lots of Indian sitars and percussion, and some odd old-fashioned keyboards, but it is nowhere near as rich in melodic ideas. The majo­rity of these seventy-two minutes are almost literally spent crawling — monotonous acoustic drones, on top of which Newcombe and friends pile up all the overdubs and effects. Not even ʽSing This All Togetherʼ or ʽGomperʼ were that slow, and underneath all of its trippiness Satanic was really just a very strong pop/rock album — with great riffs (ʽCitadelʼ), stern basslines (ʽ2000 Light Years From Homeʼ), beautiful piano melodies (ʽShe's A Rainbowʼ), inventive structural shifts (ʽ2000 Manʼ), and widely varying atmospheres for different songs. In comparison — yes, in obligatory, self-triggered comparison — this «second» Request is just one dreary drone after another, where one melody usually suffices per song. If you ever wondered how in the world Newcombe could pull three albums in one year — well, I can offer a few unpleasant suggestions on where exactly he pulled them from.

If there is one proper way to enjoy this album, it must probably be handled on a very, very hot summer day somewhere out in the country, when your brain is already half turned to mush through climatic conditions, and you can do nothing whatsoever except suck on ice cubes and wander around or lie around in a near-vegetative state. (Alternately, there's artificial substances, but I'm hardly an expert on those). Under these conditions, the limp stroll of these tunes, one by one, one by one, might perfectly fit the environment, and help your struggling brain readapt to the circumstances, or just forget about them altogether. But do NOT make the mistake — like I did — of listening to this in a perfectly brisk and vigorous state, because it will drag you down merci­lessly, and not in a good, depressing sort of manner, either: it will just mush you up all over.

To understand what I am talking about, it is perfectly sufficient to listen to the first track: ʽAll Around Youʼ greets you with a slo-o-o-o-w jangle-drone, group harmonies that sound like dazed mantras, and a spoken lead vocal part where Newcombe basically just welcomes you to chill out and enjoy the experience (thus, a song that pays tribute to the opening ʽSing This All Togetherʼ and the closing ʽOn With The Showʼ at the same time, except BJM take special care to purge out any possible traces of «energy»). Gradually, there will be more guitars, keyboards, and back vocals piling up on you, but the energy level will be constantly kept at near-zero, and this is all you are going to get not just from this song — from the entire album. Nothing here, not a single song, sounds significantly different from the opener.

As it happens, despite the title, the Stones are not really the major influence on the album — I would probably have to say that Donovan is a bigger presence (ʽDonovan Saidʼ is actually a re­write of ʽThe Fat Angelʼ), his not-too-catchy summer psycho-folk vibe reflected here as precisely as anything; as for the melodies, Newcombe draws on the Beatles at least as much as he does on the Stones (the short acoustic ballad ʽLove Of My Lifeʼ borrows the chord progression from the beginning of ʽI'm Looking Through Youʼ, and also has a Kinks vibe to it, I think), but since most of these melodies are taken at such ridiculously slow tempos, they do not so much feel as «melo­dies» as they do as «mind-melting note sequences», and since they melt my mind rather than stick to it, how could I even begin describing this stuff?

I do admit there is some «songly» potential at least in those tracks where Newcombe turns to the little devil inside him, and succumbs to his blasphemous instigations — ʽJesusʼ is a desperate Jobian plea because "I gave you my love but you tore me to pieces, have mercy please Jesus", and ʽAnemoneʼ puts the blame on his girl because "you should be picking me up, instead you're dragging me down", and both are steadily and very lightly simmering with anxiety and paranoia, but neither of the two dares bring up the tempo or kick it up otherwise in the energy department, because, well, you know, it might just spoil that hot summer mood. Everything has to be slow, quiet, implied rather than felt directly, or it won't fit the rules of the game. Don't believe me? The next-to-last track is called ʽSlowdown (Fuck Tomorrow)ʼ, and it sounds like Syd Barrett had a twin brother who was even more incapacitated.

Despite all this, no thumbs down from me. I understand that the record has a certain purpose and a certain style, and that there are certain people and certain circumstances for which it could be much more useful than the first Satanic Majesties' Request. I do believe that the grooves could be made more interesting and less derivative, but this is, after all, an album that openly celebrates the idea of «laziness», and such an album should consist of nothing but «lazy» melodies with «lazy» arrangements, to which lazy people would listen on lazy days, hanging out their lazy tongues and staring at static skies with lazy eyes. That purpose is definitely fulfilled to some ex­tent, and so, from an objective stance, I couldn't honestly say this is a «bad» record. I could honestly say, though, that it relates to the original Satanic Majesties — as well as most of its other influences — much like Psycho II relates to the original Psycho, so do not fall for that type of legacy-claiming arrogance.