The Brian Jonestown Massacre
Methodrone

THE REVIEW

Like an ancient fern, guardian of time and greenery, this plant releases into the air a myriad of spores, just as many albums have the gift of emitting a myriad of sound particles into the air; some go straight into your head, others slowly embed themselves in your heart, others inevitably tend to penetrate into a narrow and somewhat filthy little place.

Because talking about an album in terms of how it was produced, how it was architected, how it was made is human. But talking about an album regarding how it made you feel...is recognizing the supreme dominance of external forces. I could also talk about known parasitic astral entities, but I do not hold the license for such freedom of thought, and then these are arguments that only the Great Absent can sustain.

Methodrone is thus the first unofficial long take of the award-winning BJM Social Reason, while it captured the attention of an apparently shoegaze and '90s audience and invisibly placed itself in the deepest recesses of the atrioventricular septum. Among the wild darkness typical of its irascible frontman, that dandy style transplanted by chance into an Easy Rider doped film crew, walking barefoot among pebbles and debris, sipping eternal moments of vodka soda and consuming shovelfuls of unfiltered cigarette packs. Whistling stumblingly and wandering at lunchtime with pajamas, slippers, and the inseparable Stetson, with the evening's caress approaching and that healthy desire to refresh soul and core, washing armpits in the tour bus sink.

Guy De Maupassant, I don’t remember in what context, narrated that one should love madly, but without seeing what one loves. This is because seeing is understanding, and understanding sometimes is despising. A person of Caucasian mold, with medium Western educational attendance Taylor Made and a lover of René Descartes, could potentially be afflicted by methodical anxieties about the interpretation of this blind love. For instance, they might perceive priority in feeling inadequate for their world vision of this interpretive blindness; they might need to conduct their existence according to a model, preferably theoretical.

Turn on the light, they would say distressed and dismayed by the darkness, probably.

And from that theoretical model, ascend ever higher, further up along the social pyramid, reaching the peaks of the technocratic model, the ultimate stop of the journey without the luggage stolen in sleep. In other areas where I operate, but not this one, one might discuss where the prevailing cult of Reason (of others) has actually been leading us in recent years; Gaza, Syria, Myanmar, Ukraine, Pakistan, Sudan, holding the blood-stained hands of third-party innocents on those final stretches of the international shroud. One could perhaps say that reason and conformity are gently making us dance inexorably to the margins of narrow, deadly chasms. Seeing is understanding, understanding the value differences of your neighbor, being drawn to the neighboring garden, more flowery and greener.

Initiating the primordial cult of envy.

The Cartesian view of God as merely instrumental to man's existential and material project is so well synthesized in these thoughts of Blaise Pascal, directed to his philosophical rival Descartes.

"I cannot forgive Descartes. He would have liked, in all his philosophy, to be able to do without God; but he could not avoid giving Him a tap to set the world in motion: after which, he doesn't know what to make of Him."

Most likely, Newcombe might have a preference for Pascal's symbolist search, as on the cover of Methodrone the faces of the band's members are only perceived, almost laughing images of a dream, with the harsh epilogue revealing that each smile, in the end, hides a wild and cruel flower between the teeth. Searching in those faces and that densely narrated harmony of sounds in Wisdom, those sacred “correspondences,” those ancient and hidden connections between the abysses of the soul, between objects of other lives and current sensations. With perception becoming that train that passes backwards, descending along the slopes of that pyramid to that terminus and interweaving of physical and symbolic realities.

Because the angelic interactions and dialectics between Reason and Love, between the instrumental and the supernatural God would go perfectly with the immersion in the Methodrone-Verse at night with eyes closed, with the cover studded with images of the band members shrouded in a deep moorland and the album's title leaving no doubt that that Cartesian architrave is radically dismantled and dismembered. A bit like when Hobbes asserted that the weak Cartesian passage and where all his syntax collapses occurs when one moves from the statement of the experience of thought to the affirmation of the existence of a thinking substance. Here the donkey falls, because one shifts from the plane of a given experience to the plane of a metaphysical assertion, namely the plane of recognizing a reality of which there is no experience.

Because God indeed is felt. Perceived. But usually, not seen.

Methodrone is entirely enveloped in a dense and thick moorland; it seems like a creature suspended in the waters, roaming offshore at night, bordering unexplored seabeds, an alien creature at times desolate, at times joyful. The mystery of BJM's primordial music takes shape and branches out like a source of light wrapping vaults and capitals suspended mid-air, measured with arpeggios and dictates sometimes mundane, sometimes supernatural. A microcosm wrapped mainly in three basic chords, repeated in an infinite temporal cycle of suspended smoke vaults, with parts of the album sometimes seeming so similar as to appear as a single source of sound flows. With entire albums making us feel like we've listened to just one 70-minute song, but we make it work. With Newcombe's modular singing often gasping and agonized, not without off-pitch notes and vocal personalisms, but we make it work. Because the secret of pearls like That Girl Suicide and Crushed lies in the perfect and geometric harmony governing everything, loop reverbs echo & distortions, part of a single mantra of otherworldly matrix. As said before, under the Assembly of External Forces and the Dominant Genesis.