The Brain Jonestown Massacre – ‘Tepid Peppermint Wonderland’: a Retrospective (TeePee Records)

Whilst browsing in the library the other day I perchanced upon a new copy of this double CD collection, presumably put together to coincide with the resurgence of interest in the Brian Jonestown Massacre as thousands of folks previously unaware of their work witness the band’s larger than life presence and dysfunctional antics in Ondi Timoner’s excellent and successful film Dig!, and head to the record shops to find out more.

As one of those aforementioned folks, and as someone who felt the BJM actually came across as a pretty cool band in the movie despite all the idiocy and nonsense, I figure this should be a pretty entertaining listen well worthy of the 90p rental charge.

So what’s the verdict? Well be aware when reading what follows that I’m an incurable lover of ‘60s rock kitsch, and shake your head sadly and mock and deride me all you like, but shit man, I can’t help what I feel, and what I feel is that this is really rather fucking good!

Shamelessly and entirely retrogressive, compositionally and lyrically conservative, egocentric dilettantes living out obsolete rock star fantasies, obnoxious time-wasters, "Oasis with phaser pedals & better haircuts"... all of these are perfectly valid criticisms of the Brain Jonestown Massacre, but alla that’s just so much water off a duck’s back once this gear actually hits my stereo.

Let’s be clear from the outset that what we’re dealing with here is a 100% proof tribute to the '60s, direct from the mind a single-minded obsessive whom you can imagine probably saw footage of the 'Stones circa Aftermath on TV some time in early childhood, and instantly decided life on earth didn’t get much better than that. Subsequently he probably picked up the Nuggets box set, the first Velvets album, some Byrds and Love, whatever, but he clearly knows what he likes and anything post-'69 or with less than 18 guitar strings in evidence is out the fucking window.

Cool with that? Good – let’s tuck in! Because the things Anton Newcombe likes about '60s music are substantially the same things I like about it, and whatever else there might be to say about him (and unfortunately there is much to say), his talent for pushing his fever dreams of imaginary psychedelic pop glory out of his head and into living, breathing reality is second to none. Take any number of songs from this collection, and you can be sure that if I’d discovered them hidden away on a 2nd hand LP or post-Nuggets compilation, they’d get an instant “HELL YEAH!” reaction and earn an honorary place on my mental list of prime psyche gear. Admittedly, there’s nothing particularly freaky, noisy or unprecedented going on here to excite the ears of serious heads or collectors, and furthermore the dice are probably loaded in the bands favour here in that this is a selection of the best tracks culled from a far larger body of work, and the quality still starts to sag a little on the second disc..... but for anyone who still gets a kick out of that elusive alchemy of beautiful and faintly mysterious multi-layered guitar textures, foppish rock n’ roll swagger and dazed n’ confused, lysergic emotional reverie that characterises the best mid-‘60s flower-punk - well make no mistake, the BJM got it DOWN.

And there’s over two straight hours of it here! So you can do what you like unbeliever – I’m gonna wash my pyjamas, turn up the heating and put the fuckin’ kettle on, cos this one’s gonna be seeing me straight through to spring.

………………………………………………………………

Also, another point worth mentioning, and one which was surprisingly left unexplored by Dig!’s otherwise exhaustive trawl of the rivalry between the two bands (possibly for legal reasons?), is the amount of stuff the Dandy Warhols have directly and unapologetically ripped from the Brain Jonestown Massacre back catalogue;

So rev up your downloading machines, and have a listen to the BJM’s “When Jokers Attack” (recorded 1997) and the Warhols’ “Godless” (recorded 2001?), and tell me that wouldn’t be actionable in court.

But then, the BJM stole pretty much the entirety of the Byrds “Feel a Whole Lot Better” for their song “This is Why You Love Me”, and in essence their entire career is based on thinly veiled tributes to stuff recorded before they were born, so swings and roundabouts.

At the end of the day I’m glad they exist.

Magik Markers - A Penegyric to Things I Do Not Understand (Gulcher records)

It would be no exaggeration to say that the Magik Markers’ performance at All Tomorrow’s Parties last year changed my life, or at the very least has been directly responsible for a lot of the best things that have happened to me over the past nine months.

It’s hard to convey in words the actually mechanics of a Magik Markers performance without it sounding fairly stoopid – I think a visual record of the spectacle works a lot better, so here's a link to some photos that'll give you the general idea. In addition, here's one cool photo I found on the ATP site;



Raaurgh!

At a certain point at ATP - possibly as Eliza Ambrogio stood on the edge of the stage spitting incomprehensible insults into the faces of the crowd and projecting her guitar in front of her like a phallic wand, punching the strings with her fist, and as Leah Quimby slowly thumped the neck of her bass against the floor and Pete Nolan finally gave up any attempt at a rhythm and collapsed through the front of his kit – a bolt of lightning hit me in the forehead, cleared my mind and helped me realise again what I learned long ago from the Ramones, but that somehow got lost in transit at some point during the expansion of my record collection: that musical proficiency and comprehensibility are totally irrelevant, that anyone with self-belief and the right attitude can get on stage and just SHRED, and maybe they’ll be the best band in the world, and maybe they’ll be the worst band in the world, but what they won’t be is BORING, and that’s what counts – kicking shit up, making an impression.

So keeping this revelation in mind, a few days after the festival I scrawled out some flyers saying I wanted to start a crazy open-ended type band, ability not an issue. I left a few of them around. To my great surprise, this actually generated some responses and has introduced me to a few extremely good friends whom I’d never otherwise have met and, although I haven’t actually got anything mega-cool nailed down yet, it’s encouraged me to really throw my efforts into making some music, with both new allies and old.

Ironically, nothing I’ve had a go at thus far has been anywhere near the confrontational chaos of the ‘Markers, and actually I’ve ended up mostly riding a pretty conventional train, learning to play the guitar a lot better, pulling some threads of song-writing together, taking tentative steps toward singing and recording.

So I guess I owe the Magik Markers and the spirit they breathed into me big-time, but until this weekend I’d never actually heard any of their appropriately weird and scattered recorded output.

So anyway, yeah, this new Magik Markers CD I bought off Volcanic Tongue. It’s GREAT! It really does manage to a certain degree to capture the exhilarating freedom/destruction dynamic of their live performances. It’s divided into two 20 minute tracks, each accompanied by a scribbled list of arbitrary and probably fake song titles such as “Jung Knew Enough to Shut Up”, “The Ghost Combs Round at Midnight” and, my personal favourite, “One More Time Against the Wall”. The drummer is flamin’ throughout, laying down a few almost death metal licks amid the inevitable free-form antics, and I could swear the girls are actually, like, playing their guitars at some points, and it sounds like one of the blighters has a wah-wah pedal too. There are also bits of near silence, whistling, DIY percussion, broken strings etc that sound like some kinda pre-school Moondog and prove that whatever these crazy kids turn their hands (and mouths and feet and knuckles and foreheads) to, there’s some kinda unique spirit going on that renders it totally compelling where certain others in the avant-free-whatever type underground just come across as time-wasters. There’s a section of early Sonic Youth string-scrapin’ vengeance about 7 minutes into track 2 that just plain rocks so much it’s positively Zeppelin, man!

The hints at formalism starting to creep through the ‘Markers attack on this CD make for a record that’s actually lots of fun to listen to, without losing sight of any of the inspiring, atavistic craziness that makes Magik Markers akin to opening up a barrel of “WHAT THE FUCK?” and jumping right in. I don’t think Elisa shouts or howls or swears enough, but aside from that this is tops.

QUALITY OF ARMOUR:

So far whatever reason I was down for a bit back there.

No update here since last weekend you’ll note, cos the only musical thing I’ve felt the urge to talk about is how much Big Star TOTALLY RULE. And I’m guessing if you’re reading this you either know that already or don’t care. My obsession with them currently rides at titanic proportions - the thought of listening to ‘Radio City’ on the way to work gets me out of bed in the morning, selected extracts from the Third album get me home at night, and in the meantime I stare out of the window waiting for the weird woman with a kinda cape made of binbags who clambers across the verge in the middle of the road and runs across the traffic at about 3pm every afternoon, and replay Big Star songs in my head amid other fanciful thoughts.

Aside from Big Star though, pop music, what’s it all about, eh? I get home Friday night and don’t really feel like listening to any music, except for the unspeakable feedback atrocities I’m making to keep myself busy and to test the limitations of my new digital 4-track. So I do that for a while, I watch a movie without much music in it, and some menacing buzz vortexes and downer metal courtesy of Double Leopards and Burning Witch get me to sleep in a perversely comfortable fashion.

Saturday morning, still don’t feel too much like diving into that ol’ CD mountain – let’s try silence for a while. I wonder if my acoustic guitar is still in tune and play my own weird, homemade blues on it to try and find out. It sounds belligerent and bad, but I kinda like it – I shall keep the feeling in mind and play it again sometime. Then more silence. (Watch yer back, Jandek!)

I go to the Spar to pick up a paper and some milk, and fuck me, ‘Keep on Running’ by the Spencer Davis Group is playing on the radio and, god, holy jesus, is that a great record or WHAT? Man, everything about it, that bass-line, the jagged ‘dur-dur-dur’ drums n’ rhythm guitar, that killer fuzz-tone lead creepin’ in round edges, and the vocal is just SWEET – gotta be about the best soul singing ever laid down by a white British guy. It’s not as breathless or insistent as a lot of ‘60s r’n’b / garage, but it’s got that kinda cool cat stomp and you couldn’t help but shake. I love how it was a hit... I guess it was just too good NOT to be a hit. Not that I wanna come across as completely backward-looking, but imagine if one of those lame NME type groups around today came out with a tune with even a fraction of the grace or guts or musical suss as this, the bottom would fall right outta the whole world. (Why is it that all chart-aimed guitar music these days sounds so UGLY? Punk rock as a musical style, as opposed to a spirit or philosophy, has a lot to answer for. But I won’t get dragged into that one just now.)

I know mostly when you read interviews with these kinda mid-60s bands they’re often quite cynical, and talk about how they were just in it for the money they’d get for gigs, or to impress those Beatle-worshipping little girls, and how the producer came up with all the good ideas, and they really just wanted to go home and listen to the blues or whatever, but you can’t hide a love of music, and MAN, these guys must have felt like gods when they first heard the playback of this one, whether it sold 3 copies or 3 million, the vibe is just there – SUCCESS mixed down on tape. It’s nearly as good as Big Star. I feel better.

Pop music – it’ll be with me always, the more I deny it the better it will sound ; behind every geeky fact-obsessed music journo with 2495857 records, there’s the love of that perfect, simple sound that goes above and below words, and a need to believe in it after everyone else has given in and surrendered and turned the TV on. That’s what separates us from people who build model railways or whatever – that kinda emotional need. Maybe it’s strange and unhealthy, but maybe it’s something to be proud of. Many of us who have this feeling know we’ll never be able to pay appropriate tribute to it in voice and looks and dance moves, many of us are awkward and clumsy and lonely, so we gotta spew out crap like this instead. And that, in a single paragraph, could be a pretty good history of that strange misfit discipline that Americans call ‘Rock Writing’ and British people prefer to term ‘Music Journalism’.

The sun’s out – time to get a haircut and shave. Thanks, pop music.

And rock music’s even better obviously – gee, wait till I get round to some of that!

Saturday Feb 11th, 1:38PM;

Oh my fucking god, why did nobody let me know before how FUCKING AMAZING The Boredoms’ ‘Super AR’ is??

I mean, stuff I’ve read/heard about it has it pegged as a kinda transitional album on which they started developing the genius stuff brought to fruition on ‘VisionCreationNewSun’.. so, probably pretty cool, I reasoned, but since I’ve already got the motherlode, I can probably let it slide for the minute.

Oh, why didn’t the fuckers tell me?? This is the most astonishing, invigorating thing I’ve heard in months... Yeah, it’s got the tranced-out tribal percussion, lunatic electronics and no-mind Buddhist euphoria of VCNS, but, but... this one’s also got, like, crazed punk rock jamfests and beautiful acoustic-y Japanese folk/drone moments when the attack fades out and, and, and, oh my god, and MASSIVE FUCKING MOUNTAINOUS METAL GUITAR RIFFS of the kind you need an icepick to get the top of, piled up in carefully textured, multi-layered, psychedelic fucking bliss!!!

It’s so amazing I think I’m going to explode, but before I do, I’ll find time to note that this album is from, like, what, 1999 [AllMusic sez '98]? And somehow it manages to combine pretty much EVERY sound and idea that’s been considered trendy and exciting in underground rock over the past 5 years or so into one perfectly realised, unified whole... and then just ROCKS it into oblivion.

Track 1 sounds like a Boris album being played through an echoplex on a mutated turntable that keeps dramatically speeding up and slowing down.

Track 3 gets so fucking intensely cosmic I think I’ll be convulsing on the floor dreaming I’ve just founded a colony on the moons of Jupiter by the time it’s over – and I’ve only got it on quietly!

Track 4 sounds like a deathmatch between Neu! and the Butthole Surfers with Captain Beefheart trying to keep pace on vocals – no unwarranted exaggeration intended here folks, that is actually what it sounds like.

After that things get pretty freaky and disjointed in the spirit of the earlier, messier Boredoms albums, but y’know, after the proceeding four tracks I think my senses have been stretched and pummelled to the extent that I’m right there with ‘em for once and can dig whatever they wanna throw at me.

I’ll never forgive the music community, independent media and interwebnet-o-sphere for leading me to believe I could sleep on an album this sensational for years.

Fucking wow.

BILL MURRAY LIVES!

The Chalets / Hot Puppies / The Lusts

Leicester Music Café, 08/02/06

The Lusts are great. Well, I mean, they’re bloody awful... but they’re great. Initially I think; what the hell is going on here? These idiots can’t play their guitars properly and definitely can’t sing.. all I can hear is a snare drum and noise. Then I chastise myself for thinking like that and momentarily going against all I believe; cos these kids totally wanna be the Ramones. They’ve taken ‘learn 3 chords and form a band’ to heart, only they don’t have a Joey, and they clearly can’t be arsed with practice. So they sound kinda like the Replacements at their first rehearsal, only without the advantages of Paul Westerberg’s songs or Bob Stimsons’s guitar. This is stupid, sloppy teenage punk rock the way it should be done ; aimless, pointless, moronic, chaotic, snotty, noisy, funny, drunken and guaranteed to enrage any ‘musician’ within earshot. They play for too long and they don’t wreck enough stuff, but man, who cares – you shoulda seen the girls jumping for joy at the front of the stage. Why didn’t I have the guts to do this when I was 17?? Best band of the night.

Don’t ask me how, but I can tell the Hot Puppies are Welsh before they open their mouths. Something indefinable about their build, facial characteristics, aura – they all kinda remind me of former friends and acquaintances. (Hey, why don’t I start a eugenics weblog? That would be good for a laugh!)
They’ve got their stuff down good anyway, their stuff primarily consisting of unashamedly chart chasing white new wave pop in the vein of..... well I bet every review they get says B52s, but c’mon, there’s precious little ‘Love Shack’ goin’ on here, it’s just that most of the other groups who defined this particular sound back in the ‘80s take a bit more critical dredging to exhume. So we’re talkin, I dunno, the Barracudas? Martha & the Muffins? How should I know – you go down to Oxfam and get digging. And actually, how about Blondie? Yeah, there’s Blondie here for sure. From my own record collection, I’d make favourable comparisons to X circa ‘Under the Big Black Sun’ cos there is a slightly serious side to proceedings too, and some fine and interesting lyrics to grab my attention. But mostly it’s choppy guitar, woozy organ, belting female vox ; skinny tie party time. They’re a great, tight band and they bang it out nice and loud. And any band that gets the girls twirling around and dancing whilst the boys stand around looking faintly uncomfortable is definitely onto a good thing, right?

Legend has it The Chalets got together whilst attending All Tomorrow’s Parties – hence the name. Somehow I get the feeling they weren’t there to see Shellac. We’re in territory only leaping distance from the Hot Puppies and it makes perfect sense that they should tour together. Bouncy, floor-filling robot-rock from the boys, squiggly keyboards, synchronised dance moves and smart, saucy verbage from the front-ladies. Imagine a kind of Carry On Ladytron – it’s irresistible stuff, and fun-loving kids, electroclash refugees and indie-popsters old enough to know better will all lap it up. There’s a coupla stone-cold classic pop songs amid the silliness as well – ‘2 Chord Song’ being a particular stand-out. Ideally, you wanna see a band like this whilst guzzling whisky with friends at a non-existent (in this town) cool nightclub on a Saturday night and go nuts at the front and flail around on stage and generally act like an idiot. But a heavy winter coat sags on my shoulders, stone sobriety sags in my brain, I’m in a ‘music venue’ and I’ve got work in the morning, so hence all this chirpy frolicking starts to grate after about 25 minutes, especially when they launch into a song that begins with a long, muscular, repetitive instrumental build-up – I KNEW you had it in you somewhere, you Pontins-bothering fuckers!

To the dismay of the crowd, the bass player dedicates a song to “Bill Murray, who died today..”. A collective NO WAY rises from the assembled pop fans. Did we mishear? Was he just fucking with our heads? Needless to say, post-gig enquiries reveal Bill Murray to be very much still with us, and so what the hell was all that about, dude?

In a similar spirit of tasteless morbidity, I hereby declare that the Chalets have all died in a flaming bus wreck on their way to [wherever their next gig is].

Actually, I guess most likely he was referring to somebody else who actually did die – in which case I apologise.

Hmm.. a whole evening of glorious throwaway pop, and it still all comes back to death doesn’t it? Grr! Time to put some Will Oldham on.

A news agent billboard for the Leicester Mercury I just saw has perhaps the best grumpy-slow-days-day-depressing-local-paper headline I've ever seen;

"COST OF DYING MAY RISE!"

As part of his attempt to liven up discussion on the music forum of Barbelith, Jack Fear asked me to put together a thread on 'House of the Rising Sun'. So I've extended my weblog post of a couple of weeks ago into a full length essay and invited discussion. You can read it here, and perhaps even contribute your own thoughts (ludicrously draconian membership procedures allowing).

PART TWO (L - Z);

Lucky Luke

Pinned in every press reference they’ve received as “Fairport meets Velvets”, I’m hearing a lot more of the former than the latter going on here – which is cool. Lucky Luke’s debut album ‘Patrick the Survivor’, recorded with a rag-tag eight piece line-up, is an impressive piece of work, mixing heart-warming ‘all together now!’ folk rock stormers with longer, darker atmospheric pieces that kinda recall the windswept melancholy vibe of the Dirty Three. Since then they seem to have shed a few members and tightened up into a more straightforwardly rocking unit, which is, if anything, even better. I watched Lucky Luke play in Glasgow recently with a tear of joy in my eye at the sight of young folk making such a lovely, ragged, rousing, soulful sound untainted by the whims of fashion or the depressive blight of modern life – “dancing and kissing / the best things are free!” – hell yeah. I think they’re one of those bands that are going to stay with me for the duration. Love is in the air then they hit my ears. http://www.luckyluke.co.uk/

Mugstar

Liverpool’s Mugstar more or less equal a punk rock Hawkwind. Lemmy era, naturally. They know which sounds are good, and make them a lot, erecting no nonsense space-rock monuments out of motorik rhythm damage, juggernaut DUR-DUR-DUR riffage, whiteout noise crescendos and vintage space echo. Flying to the centre of the universe in a rust-bucket freighter running on red diesel, just like in the old days – fucking awesome. Nuff said I think ; Mugstar don’t waste time, so I won’t waste words. Get yer head nodding: http://www.mugstar.com/home

Not in This Town

Up-and-coming Nottingham band who were nice enough to send me their demo. (You don’t see many “demos” anymore do you? I guess what with cheaper and easier recording and all this bloody internet malarky people tend to go straight to releasing supposedly ‘proper’ records on tiny ‘ok-it’s-basically-just-us-in-disguise’ style labels? Good thing or bad thing? – discuss.) Well anyway, this is a pretty fine demo if I do say so myself – it has spirited, somewhat Rodan-ish metallic, unnerving riffs and rough, yelped male and female vocals conveying odd, unexpected melodies and some distinctly weird lyrics. Something makes me think of the Melvins circa ‘Houdini’, but I’m not sure what. Promising for sure, and I think they’d be good live. [[can't find a website, and it's not exactly an easy name to do a google search for... maybe there was one w/ the demo.. er, I'll get back to you]]

Park Attack

Another spike in Scotland’s ever-impressive musical bat, Glasgow’s Park Attack gleefully heave the guidelines out the window and prove like the greats before them that avant garde rule-breaking and pop & rhythm & dancing needn’t be mutually exclusive. Centred around the dissonant chuggin’ of a free-tuned, three string guitar (think Sterling Morrison sliced in two or Mark Sandman’s one string bass moves in Morphine) and some perverse, almost Silver Apples-esque drum kit conceptions, with additional members adding a whole raft of weird noise on bass, fx, keys and goodness knows what else, Park Attack have charged through some of the enticing doors left open by the more exciting bands of the original NY No Wave scene – Mars in particular. But rather than propagating that scene’s well played-out agenda of urban alienation and post-industrial disgust, Park Attack have harnessed their ear-pricking sonic wreckage to the forces of good, placing the emphasis on body-rocking rhythmic work-outs so transparently joyful an open-minded toddler could get on down to them – like vintage Sonic Youth, they casually straddle the divide between form and chaos and make a scrappy, infectious junkyard noise breaking at the seams with life. http://www.parkattack.co.uk/