The Brian Jonestown Massacre – The Future Is Your Past

The Brian Jonestown Massacre (these days basically Anton Newcombe) have just released their 20th studio album and The 13th Floor’s Floyd Lee has had a listen (or two).

In the midst of the global pandemic with the cities plagued and the people apathetic, Anton Newcombe (founder of The Brian Jonestown Massacre) wrote & recorded seventy two new songs, uploading a demo a day in the depths of lockdown. These demos were delivered like war time pamphlets designed to uplift the down and out. Ten of those demos, (now mixed and mastered) appear on the band’s recent release The Future Is Your Past. Biblical in its words of inspiration and lamentation, urgency & alchemy, this is a compilation of esoteric affirmations to rouse a wounded world.

 

Concocting a sonic brew of Beatles twang & Hendrix moans, Stones piano & Velvet drones. Whilst simultaneously summoning the spirits of Roky Erikson, Jim Morrison & Syd Barrett. Anton breaks into the ephemeral tombs of psychedelia, blowing new life into old bohemian bones. Resurecting and restructuring the sixties mystic spell. Here stands the sound of the Summer of Love defiant before the firing squad. Encircled by surveillance, plagues & long range missiles. Anton empowered, leads the battle charge. 

 

The album opens with Do Rainbows Have Ends? advising the listener “To give it all you got, it’s the only way to live”.  Twelve string guitars sparkle and glisten like church bells surfing a San Francisco groove. The lyrics describe the singer, standing before God, about to play “this song”. Confiding to the listener “I hope I do not play it wrong”.

Track Four, Fudge!, opens slow, with morning dew guitars and declarations before the dawn. Robin Hood folk strums accompany a call “To Fight On”. Suddenly bursts the flicker of heavy horse hoof drums, galloping below whirlpools of jingle jangle west coast chimes. The circus organ high in the mix hovers like a flying saucer beaming science fiction laser signals through the third eye. Each note rising, rides the giddy carousel, with strobe light cathedral twirls. The voice inside the cyclone declares in defiance “The world is trying to drag you down & fuck you into a hole, but I’m going to fight it, win and beat it with my soul”.

The manic drums on The Mother Of All Fuckers rain down like Muhammed Ali unleashing lightning blows. Goliath tones juxtapose conjuring a kaildoscopic hurricane. In the vortex the vocals call out “Do you remember your past and the dreams that once lived in your head?”.

The album in sentiment echoes the message of Dylan Thomas, “To not go gentle into that good night, to rage, rage, against the dying of the light”. From William Blake to Bob Dylan, John The Baptist and John Lennon, a mystic lineage runs through eras of darkness like candles in a row. In these modern times Anton Newcombe is a candle of our own. 

 

Floyd Lee

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