Archive for Aufheben

The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s “Revelation” Is Perfectly Named

Posted in Music with tags , , , on May 19, 2014 by johnbuckley100

Beginning in 2010, when Who Killed Sgt. Pepper was the follow-up to My Bloody Underground, we began to think of the Brian Jonestown Massacre as a superb live band with one of the great back catalogues in rock, but not really a band whose who new album would engender much excitement.

But then came 2012’s Aufheben, which had a number of songs as good as anything Anton Newcombe had ever written, with “I Want To Hold Your Other Hand” and “Blue Order New Monday” taking up permanent residence inside our earbuds.  We began to get excited about what tricks Anton still had up his sleeve.

Revelation, which officially comes out tomorrow but happily was available to download last night, is so good, we wonder if it might be the Love and Theft to Aufheben‘s Time Out Of Mind, a portent not just of a return to greatness after a less-than-great creative patch, but an indicator that Newcombe’s best work, like Dylan’s, might someday be understood to have been made when his youth was behind him — to be not what he produced when he was a young and brash punk, but what came after a hard-earned perspective.  I mean, there were days when few people might have expected Anton would be around to make an album in 2014 — but to discover that he’s produced one of the best albums of his career?  Yeah, it’s got the right name: Revelation.

The album begins wonderfully, with the Swedish rocker “Vad Hande Med Dem” giving way to the Kurt Vile-ish “What You Isn’t.”  By the time we get to “Memory Camp,” it doesn’t matter which members of the large tribe that have variously performed as BJM are playing behind Anton, it doesn’t matter that we’re in Berlin, not California, no other band or set of musicians — not even ones like the Morning After Girls who worshipped the sticky ground on which Anton walked — could produce a Brian Jonestown Massacre album half as good as this. By the time we got to “Food For Clouds,” we were grinning ear to ear.  At “Memorymix,” we were ready to take the day off and just hole up, having committed to memory the phone number to the Dominos delivery folks.  By “Xibalba” we were dancing around the house.

Over the past few weeks, as Dan and Joel and Matt, as Ricky and Frankie descended upon Austin like the Hole In The Wall Gang getting together with Butch and Sundance to go rob a bank, excitement mounted.  They came together to play at the Austin Psych Fest, and then do a few West Coast shows before heading off to Europe, and reports came fast and furious that the band was in fine form.  Interviews with Anton found him completely on his game, honest about the past, a sober father with a great sense of humor.  Revelation reveals marriage, fatherhood, and sobriety have not diminished his creativity one wit.  And of course, as is so often the case, as a sober artist, these days he’s more capable of hitting his mark.

We expect to be playing Revelation until the hard drive on our device gives out.  Most important — and we are struggling to convey this to the band of weirdos to whom this really matters — based on the evidence available here, it’s time to raise our expectations and settle in for a late run.  The albums the Brian Jonestown Massacre are producing in the mid-’10s are as good as what they produced in the ’90s.  We may be ahead of ourself thinking that Anton’s on a run like the one that Dylan went on between ’97 and, oh, 2010.  But our hopes are high again.

 

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Other Than The Magic Castles, How Were The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Mrs. Lincoln?

Posted in Music with tags , , , on August 23, 2012 by johnbuckley100

iPhone 4S

What a difference having a good album to push makes.  We’ve seen — and enjoyed immensely — the last four Brian Jonestown Massacre tours, but with the release earlier in the year of Aufheben, the first BJM album in a decade that rivals the best of their ’90s output, it was as if Anton Newcombe was reborn as a downright chatty (for him), occasionally pogoing multi-instrumentalist (okay, harmonica as well as guitar.) We counted four songs from the new album, or was it five?  They didn’t simply rely on classics from Take It From The Man; this was a set more evenly balanced between music from this decade and the previous ones.  The BJM’s live sound is so unique: a rhythm guitar army, Branca-esque in force, widens spectral mid-tones while Anton picks riffs that serve as careful filigrees over the main strumming squall.  (Having Matt Hollywood take on the singing duties from “Viholliseni Maalla” was a nice touch, and who knew he could sing in Finnish?)

Moreover, whoever would have thought we’d hear music like this in 2012?  Whoever would have thought Anton would be this strong and vital at this moment in time?  Not the last Dandy on Earth, that’s who.  Berlin agrees with him.  The band is revitalized by the new material.  They were fine last night.

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If “Dig!” Were Made Today, The Brian Jonestown Massacre Would Win

Posted in Music with tags , , , , on May 12, 2012 by johnbuckley100

Eight years after Dig! won Ondi Timoner awards and admiration for her depiction of diverging paths between The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols, you’d probably expect that the Dandys would be producing the superior music.  You’d be wrong.  As does not happen all that often, we have this Spring a clear bake off between the two bands, with BJM having released a fine return to form, Aufheben, and the Dandys releasing This Machine, another in a long line of disappointments stretching back to… well, about the time that Dig! came out and declared Courtney Taylor Taylor the “winner” over notorious BJM frontman fuck-up Anton Newcombe.

Look, no one at Tulip Frenzy is going to declare that the last few batches of BJM music were on a par with such earlier albums as Take It From The Man. Who Killed Sgt. Pepper and other works from the late ‘aughts sounded like Newcombe was recording on an old cassette deck inside an empty Icelandic bank vault after a wild night of MDA out on the glaciers.  But Aufheben stands up to the BJM’s best work from the ’90s.  “I Want To Hold Your Other Hand” sounds like an outtake from Tepid Peppermint, and the brilliant closer, “Blue Order New Monday” picks up where “Super-Sonic” left off.  A band sounding like it once did does not necessarily signal greatness, but in the case of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, we are taking about a return to sounding like Brian Jones gigging with the Pipes of Joujouka at a renaissance fair, that special mix of psychedelic folk that comes from mixing mushrooms with Mandrax at Andy Warhol’s Factory.  And that’s a good thing.  Welcome back, guys!  The move to Kreuzberg or Mitte has been good for Anton, the choice of Berlin as a place to live showing up in Aufheben‘s first song, “Panic In Babylon,” which could be the background music in the hippest donor kebab restaurant in the city.

The Dandys, on the other hand?  Ooof.  Some time back the lovely Zia McCabe took to the comments section of Tulip Frenzy to plead for a reconsideration of our verdict that the Dandys had grown to kinda suck.  We were sympathetic to her argument, because we loved the band. And we anxiously awaited the evidence that they still mattered. But while Aufheben sounds like it was carefully handcrafted by a band of psych-folk artisans living in a post-apocalyptic flat near Alexanderplatz, This Machine seems phoned in, lazy, flat, uninspired.  Even on the album’s two or three good songs, the Dandys sound, at best, generic.  We never thought they’d be generic because FM radio is so passé.  This makes us sad.

Which brings us back to Dig!, and how Courtney got to do the victor’s dictation of history — he literally got to do the voice-over on how, sadly, he’d loved Anton and thought he was a genius, but the evidence was all too clear that he was a junkie who would never get his act together.  And here we are, in 2012, and one band is vital and one band not.  The addled tortoise on the autobahn has just smoothly passed the Portland hare.  Life is funny sometimes.  Go buy Aufheben at once.

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