The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Powerstation June 16 2018

“I love you but I’m working right now, I can love you after I’ve finished working” said The Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe to a woman in the crowd, as they performed to a packed Powerstation last night.
It was perhaps the most telling moment of their two hour set. As an artist, Newcombe’s onstage antics have been making headlines for two decades. His breathlessly prolific creative output has seen the Brian Jonestown Massacre become a flagship band of the psych-rock/60s revival. Their kaleidoscopic sound has spanned noise, Monkees-inspired pop, rock, film scores, electronica and folk and has found them an intergenerational fan base.

It is clear that Newcombe loves his work  and the act of creation.  But his dedication to his cause has meant that Newcombe has established a prickly reputation. From stopping his band halfway through a song to start all over again, to full on fist fights and unsavoury jokes aimed at audience members, Newcombe has a history of inappropriate behaviour rooted in his quest for perfectionism. Given their acid-soaked free-wheeling sound was first founded in the free-love era of the 1960s, his occasional outbursts seem counter-intuitive and can mar an otherwise technically good show.

Aside from a sole threat to replay a song “because the entire band was out of tune” Newcombe was on good form and last night acted as a reminder of Brian Jonestown’s legacy. Their multi-layered sound is a richly hyperbolic tapestry played that was played with depth and mastery thanks to flamboyant tambourines, organs, woozy basslines and swirling guitarwork.   Crowd favourites When Jokers Attack, Aenome, and Who? were interspersed nicely with cuts from their latest album Something Else;  a record which Newcombe proclaimed was inspired in part by New Zealand’s very own Flying Nun Records. “Other bands took that sound and never credited them as being an influence, but we do- I wrote a song for you guys!” he exclaimed before launching into Hold that Thought.

Prolonged jam sessions where the music ebbed and flowed around the enthralled audience was where the band inevitably shined and made up for the rather cut and paste nature of their sound and song structures. Each verse-chorus-verse pattern soon became overly familiar, both compared to the band’s own catalogue and the styles they pull from. The jams added welcome novelty and adrenaline, with their build and release of tension, walls of noise, and throbbing synergy between the band members.

Newcombe seemed to be suffering the effects of a cold, however percussionist Joel Gion backed him up well.  10 minute closer Yeah Yeah was a real highlight. A perfect psychedelic storm, it exploded into a technicolor dream, much to the audience members delight. A middle-aged couple grooved in front of me, arms undulating like they were at Woodstock, though like The Brian Jonestown Massacre, they would have missed it by a generation. For a band with such a central sound, the whole thing is a hodgepodge of eras. Here were refugees from the punk decades, dancing to 60s psychedelia with a Velvet Underground edge- that retro style being performed by a band that came up in the grunge heyday, broke big during the garage revival, and is now worshipped by hip millenials, all brought together by a man obsessed with the Rolling Stones, with the temperament of Jim Morrison, and the obsessive perfectionism of Roger Waters.

Despite their sound being somewhat predictable, with The Brian Jonestown Massacre, you never quite know what you’re going to get.

Kate Powell

Click on an image to see a photo gallery by Reuben Raj that includes images of Arthur Ahbez and The Flaming Ahbez who opened the show for Brian Jonestown Massacre: