The Brian Jonestown Massacre
Third World Pyramid

I have read a bunch of reviews of this latest album by Anton and company and I think I have mostly read the same things everywhere. In most cases, 'Third World Pyramid' (released last October via A Recordings) has been considered simply as another chapter in the discography of a band, undoubtedly great and influential like the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and in this sense would not be decisive anyway for what is the history of the band. Among all these, few have really tried to delve into the real contents of the album and talk about the music, practically proposing a sort of standard review model that is generally used for artists who would have nothing new to demonstrate and who mostly carry out a sort of craftsmanship without particular and relevant innovations in sound and style. In other cases, the usual rubbish has been repeated. I mean. Obviously, I'm talking about 'Dig!', the documentary by Ondi Timoner, thus emphasizing the usual nonsense (in the sense of things without sense or foundation, pure exercise of fiction) about Anton (who, moreover, has declared to have practically never seen this documentary) and the Brian Jonestown Massacre.

The truth, however, is that the band's fifteenth album, completely recorded and produced at Anton's 'Cobra Studio' in Berlin, despite presenting obvious similarities in sound to the previous album, 'Revelation' (2014), actually presents a whole series of innovations in music and style that could at this point also mark the beginning of a new phase in the history of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, this without obviously taking into account the conceptual and ideological contents of the album. In this sense, 'Third World Pyramid', of which the cover is clearly also a reference to the logo of Spacemen 3 (after all, one of Anton's favorite bands and closest to the universe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre), is perhaps the most strictly 'political' album that the band has ever released. I'm talking about contents, of course. We're talking about an album that is practically completely immersed in contemporary social and political reality and whose title, after all, intends to be a reference to the abstract manner in which Anton draws a parallel between structures built on multiple levels like pyramids or the ziggurats of Babylon (structures, after all, geographically located precisely in what we now call, the 'third world') and contemporary society, which is also evidently modeled on multiple levels and iconographically representable as a human pyramid, where people are separated from each other by what are ideal concrete blocks and a separation that makes it impossible for the different parts to work together for what may be common purposes. A harsh, even brutal consideration of this particular historical moment, which perhaps seems even more current today than a few months ago. It might even seem prophetic if it weren't for the fact that history always follows its own course and nothing happens just by pure chance. But after all, Anton does not propose to be melancholy, desperate, or even catastrophic, and in this album, he offers the listener a complete spectrum of human emotions, positioning himself as a concrete critic of modern society and as such as someone who wants to be a man of his time.

Aside from this, speaking more strictly of the musical contents of the album, it is known that Anton and the Brian Jonestown Massacre arrived at this new album after and through what can be defined as a particular phase in the group's history. After the release of 'Revelation' a bunch of events followed and all of these evidently influenced the sound of the new album, both in terms of a 'redefinition' of the band in all its elements and precisely in the manner of how to conceive the songs and how these should be performed. The group brilliantly overcame what might have seemed like a crisis due to the departure of two historical members, Frankie 'Teardrop' Emerson and (not without controversy) Matt Hollywood, and the new entry of a new guitarist, Ryan Van Kriedt of the Asteroid #4 and Dead Skeletons, a musician who is not only particularly skilled but also equally ingenious and whose contribution to the sound of the band was substantial both in an innovative sense and in terms of possibilities, proving to be in this sense the right answer to some considerations expressed by Anton over time, who indeed believed that there were before too many guitarists, and who probably after the experience gained working and touring with Tess Parks, also thought of changing his own role within the band's circle of guitarists.

All these considerations are indispensable and are at the base of the making of the album and of what is apparently, even according to what was expressed by Anton himself and Ricky Maymi in an interview I had the opportunity to do with them last year, an exceptional phase for the band, which in the period between 'Revelation' and 'Third World Pyramid' released an EP (without considering, of course, 'Musique de film imaginé'), toured the USA and Europe twice and once Australia. It seems to me, I wouldn't want to be wrong, that they also gave a couple of concerts in Tokyo, Japan. In any case, the band hasn't played live so much for a long time and Anton himself, who is certainly a much more than prolific artist, is going through an important, even explosive creative phase. Just think, after all, that as I write these lines a new LP is actually already ready, which will be released next February and which, anticipated by the release of no less than three singles in the coming days, will sound, according to his statements, much more kraut-rock, PIL Limited steel box, dub, dystopic!

From the first track, I really don't understand how it can be considered that this album is something redundant or that it doesn't add anything new regarding the band's sound. There is, that's obvious, what can now be defined as the trademark, the Brian Jonestown Massacre imprint ('Like Describing Colors To A Blind Man On Acid' is for instance definitely what can be defined as a song in perfect band style, a kind of classic), but how could it be otherwise if we consider that this same imprint is then recognizable in a bunch of other groups that are inspired by or have been inspired by them. 'Good Mourning', the first song of the album, is a solemn psychedelic folk song, an irregular ditty and an evocative ballad sung by photographer and visual artist Katy Lane (who, among other things, would then be Anton's wife) with a plaintive and almost desperate voice over an arrangement that reflects the typical style of some moments of sixties folk psychedelia (I think, for instance, of Donovan or Vashti Bunyan, although the tones in this case are perhaps more solemn and might make one think of some episodes in the style of Nico). 'Don't Get Lost', 'Government Beard', and the title-track, 'Third World Pyramid' pick up the same sounds of 'Revelation' and 'Mini Album Thingy Wingy', giving a sort of continuity to what I consider being the band's current sounds and in which Anton develops his approach to musical matter which I have already had the opportunity to define as 'Hellenistic', a concretization of a model of Aristotelian thought that according to the Greek philosopher considered the universal strictly correlated to its predication in object: a sound that is therefore the consequence, the materialization of concrete speculations on the world and the history of music and man from the beginning of his journey to today. Inevitable consequence of a combination of psychedelic sounds of the western world and the triumphant echo of the fanfares that greeted the greatness of Alexander at the gates of Babylon the Great, the excessive use of fuzzy guitars and synthesizers, the sound is something that immerses listeners in a state of contemplation and where blurred images flash at the speed of light before the eyes to the various and multicolored vision beauty of the hanging gardens. An imaginary that reaches its climax with the cover of 'Assignment Song' by Nina Simone, which here is redefined in a psychedelic rock track whose opening somehow recalls in pace and arrangement style another famous cover recorded by the group in 2001 and contained in the album, 'Bravery, Repetition and Noise', that is, the 'Sailor' by the Cryan' Shames. More than nine minutes long, the track develops in an emotional crescendo and with a touch at the end of vintage with the use of the organ reminiscent of the early Pink Floyd (practically those of Syd Barrett). A style later also resumed in the last track of the album, 'The Sun Ship' (also released as a single), which sounds with a very UK psychedelic sixties style without, however, renouncing the band's genetic heritage.

A certain cinematic approach is evident in the development of 'Oh Bother', where the synthesizers sound as if they were trumpet calls and brass sections in an almost Morriconian style and where the Brian Jonestown Massacre, as on other occasions, and as the Federale (headed by the bassist of BJM, Collin Hegna) or Spindrift do, evoke the themes of western or noir films in the tradition of French cinema to which Anton has already paid ample homage in the album, 'Musique de film Imaginé', a soundtrack for an imaginary French film of the late fifties or sixties and perhaps directed by Francois Truffaut or Jean-Luc Godard. 'Lunar Surf Graveyard', nonetheless, maintains a cinematic approach even though in this case the tones and atmospheres become less aggressive and the song is built on the combination of guitar arpeggios in a tragic memorial of what is possibly the same European continent, the place where Anton has chosen to live and choosing in this sense precisely what constitutes its beating heart, the capital, Berlin, thus wanting to immerse himself in a dimension that he believes makes himself a bohemian. An artist who practices an unconventional lifestyle and who proposes, gets actively involved in artistic and particularly musical projects and movements. Anton is adventurous and at the same time a conscious artist and a citizen of the western world and who does not want to consider this as a kind of monolith but who, far from any devotion and iconoclastic approach, is instead absolutely determined to dismantle or rather resolve this Rubik's cube, this structure with multiple levels and faces that is the pyramid of the third world, the society of our time.